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I like the colors on your peacock better, @AndyW. While searching for this listing, I came across that Miroglio rondine (or its exact twin) on ebay. If that swallow guitar really sold for £20 at auction, the buyer turned it around and it sold on ebay for £80!
My thoughts too. I saw that a while back and considered it but.......
I think we've discussed the Marius guitars on this thread before, and they recently came up in the thread that @Djalt_Baculalay posted where he said his grandfather (Koen de Cauter) had ordered ~20 "Marius" guitars and sold them off as WASO merchandise.
Anyway, I was looking for Marius recently and found this old Reverb listing for an "antique Marius guitar." It clearly has a Marius marque au fer on the headstock and a distinctive design with a black pickguard with white deer and also a black/white floral rosette.
https://reverb.com/item/73235660-marius-antic-gipsy-folk-1938
There is also a current listing for the same guitar model (same distinctive bridge, tailpiece and rosette) but this time saying it was a Carmelo Catania. The deer is there but the execution of the pickguard is slightly different. Maybe this is interesting to no one but me, but absent much else in terms of knowledge on who or what was Marius, this does seems to support the leading theory as expounded earlier in this thread that "Marius" as a brand might have just been a German/Belgian/Dutch/European distributor or brand for the Sicilian produced guitars from Catania.
https://reverb.com/item/86380065-italian-catania-carmelo-deer-1957-antique-vintage-acoustic-guitar
Yes, everything we have discussed so far seems to indicate that Marius was, like Sonora and others, just a wholesale distributor brand and the examples found so far all appear to be from the normal Sicilian workshops of which Carmelo Catania was by far the biggest.
This Marius guitar probably is the model 5 or 6 by Carmelo Catania:
But with the tailpiece of #8!
Exactly! You see all these models more often with the tailpiece of model 8! From model 9 on there is another tailpiece and a different headstock shape. I have one model 1 and a model 9 and a recently got a model 17 (archtop).
On the left you can see model 9 and on the right the model 17. I have the pickguard original to the archtop model 17, but put it off to clean the top of the guitar.. . You can see the different headstock shape and the different tailpiece on these models.
@PJD After seeing your acoustic, I was going to say that the people in the pickguard resembled olympic figure skaters or ice dancers. Then, after seeing models 10 and 11, I'd say that assessment is validated. The Olympics WERE held in Rome in 1960. So, maybe some of these models were meant to build on/tie in to the spirit of that movement in the country?
I love the cool fretboard inlays on your archtop. They almost look like 80's Outrun-inspired graphics as they're referred to today. They might also be somewhat Art Deco -inspired, which would make sense thematically since that tailpiece looks a bit like the top of the Chrysler building.