(b Rome, 24 Feb 1637; d Rome, 7 Feb 1700). Italian impresario and deviser of scenic effects. He studied at the Seminario Romano, where he performed in the Latin tragedies and intermedi produced during the carnivals of 1651–3. In January 1657 he joined the Florentine Accademia degli Immobili, which produced comic operas. Before he became a Knight of Malta on 9 August 1666 he had to serve in at least four caravans, and thus travelled widely, even to Asia, Africa and America. He returned to Rome for the reign of Pope Clement IX, 1667–9 (the opera librettist Giulio Rospigliosi), who named Acciaiuoli's brother Niccolò a cardinal in 1669. During the next three decades Filippo was the theatrical master-mind behind many spectacular operas produced in and around Rome. He may have been involved with most of those given at the Palazzo Colonna, where his first two were produced in 1668–9: Jacopo Melani's Il Girello and Alessandro Melani's L'empio punito. In 1672 he was among the founders of the Accademia degli Sfaccendati, and he was the prime mover behind its productions given in 1672–3 at the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia: Bernado Pasquini's La sincerità con la sincerità, overo Il Tirinto and P.S. Agostini's Gl'inganni innocenti, overo L'Adalinda. The librettos of these four works are usually attributed to Acciaiuoli; but he probably provided only a plot featuring spectacular scenes, leaving Giovanni Filippo Apolloni to write the verse. Scenic transformations were the main attraction of his productions, and he was presumably responsible for those in another work, Chi è cagion del suo mal pianga se stesso (1682, Rome, Palazzo Colonna), with ‘text by Ovid and music by Orfeo’. Morei identified Acciaiuoli as both Ovid and Orfeo, but this claim is not substantiated elsewhere.
In 1671–2 Acciaiuoli served as impresario and deviser of intermedi for the inaugural seasons of the Tordinona, the first public opera house in Rome. From 1679 he was apparently behind the scenes at the new Teatro Capranica, the second Roman opera house. Morei reports that he invented a puppet theatre for the young Ferdinando, Grand Prince of Tuscany, which included 124 marionettes and 24 scene changes; its mechanism was so ingenious that Acciaiuoli could manipulate everything by himself. (He has, however, been credited incorrectly with the design of the puppets used at the Teatro S Moisè, Venice, in 1680–82.) A Trojan horse that he designed for a production of Pagliardi's Il Greco in Troia (1689) needed such expert manipulation that he was summoned to Florence to operate it. He devised at least one intermezzo, La noce di Benevento, o sia Il consiglio delle streghe, for the extravagant production of Pasquini's La caduta del regno dell’Amazzoni at the Palazzo Colonna in January 1690. Raguenet ended his book with a description of one marvellous transformation devised by Acciaiuoli at the Teatro Capranica in 1698: a phantom of a woman was ‘with one Motion transform'd into a perfect Palace’, while guards struck their halberds on the stage and ‘were immediately turn'd into Water-Works, Cascades, and Trees, that form'd a charming Garden before the Palace’. This led the editor (probably Nicola Haym) of the English translation to report that Acciaiuoli devised ‘many more equally surprizing’ spectacles at Roman theatres during the 1690s. The editor names four, then describes at length ‘the most famous of all, … the Intermede of Hell' in Perti’s Nerone fatto Cesare (1695): ‘great Numbers of Foreigners came to Rome on purpose to behold it, and confess'd when they had seen it, that it far exceeded the Expectations Fame had given ’em of it’.
DBI (C. Rotondi)
ES (B. Brunelli)
GroveO (L. Lindgren) [with further bibliography]
MGG1 (F. Bisogni)
M.G. Morei: ‘Filippo Acciajuoli’, Notizie istoriche degli Arcadi morti, ed. G.M. Crescimbeni, i (1720), 357–61
F. Fuà: L'opera di Filippo Acciajuoli (Fossombre, 1921)
R. Lefevre: ‘Pippo Acciajoli: Accademico Sfaccendato’, Strenna dei romanisti, xvii (1956), 256–61
R. Lefevre: ‘Gli “Sfaccendati”’, Studi romani, vii (1960), 154–65, 288–301
C. Ugurgieri della Berardenga: Gli Acciaioli di Firenze nella luce dei loro tempi (1160–1834) (Florence, 1962), 726–9
E. Tamburini: ‘Filippo Acciajoli: un “avventuriere” e il teatro’, Teatro Oriente/Occidente, ed. A. Ottai (Rome, 1986), 449–76
S. Franchi: Drammaturgia romana: repertorio bibliografico cronologico dei testi drammatici pubblicati a Roma e nel Lazio, secolo XVII (Rome, 1988)
LOWELL LINDGREN