"One could see icecold princes and ladies of the court weep when he played an Adagio. Tears even fell from his own eyes onto his violin while he was playing, reported an eye witness about the violinist Pietro Nardini, whose works for string instruments were hardly less celebrated than his emotional playing style. Once popular examples of light string quartets from the early classical period are available here in a reliable and fundamentally revised reprint based on the first edition (Florence, after 1770) and on a contemporary copy. The additions willfully added by Wilhelm Altmann in his edition (1937) have been eliminated and many irregularities corrected.