(b Palermo, bap. 1 April 1579; d Rome, 20 Nov – 31 Dec 1642). Italian poet. Having received a relatively limited education in Palermo, he went before he was 20 to Naples, where he found patronage for his poetry among the aristocracy. He also went to Rome and in 1601 was among the papal troops who opposed the Turks in Hungary. After the campaign he returned to Rome, where he began his period of most intensive literary activity: he worked under the protection of Giovanni Antonio and Paolo Girolamo II Orsini, Cardinals Ludovisi, Scipione Borghese, Orsi, and Antonio and Maffeo Barberini, among others. He travelled widely in Italy and became a member of various literary academies in Rome, Perugia, Bologna and Palermo. A man of restless and impulsive temperament, he lived an irregular life, which seems to have alternated between extremes of luxury and misery and included a prison term for insolvency. He took holy orders late in life and became a chaplain in the Roman hospital of S Sisto.
During his lifetime one volume of his Rime was published (Rome, 1630), and that and another volume of Rime appeared posthumously (Rome, 1645–6). Two oratorio texts, La fede and Il trionfo, were included in the second volume of Rime (edns of both in Alaleona: Storia, pp.289ff, and of La fede only in Pasquetti, 2/1914, pp.207ff, and Schering, appx, pp.viiff). These are the earliest printed works, either literary or musical, in which the term ‘oratorio’ is used to designate a genre. A modified version of Il trionfo was set to music, possibly by Carissimi, as Oratorio della Santissima Vergine (ed. in PIISM, 3rd ser., Oratori, viii). His many canzonettas, set to music by Orazio Michi and others, played a crucial role in the origins of the chamber cantata.
DBI (E.N. Girardi)
ScheringGO
SmitherHO, i
G. Pasquetti: L'oratorio musicale in Italia (Florence, 1906, 2/1914)
D. Alaleona: Studi su la storia dell'oratorio musicale in Italia (Turin, 1908, 2/1945 as Storia dell'oratorio musicale in Italia)
R. Holzer: Music and Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Rome (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1990)
J.W. Hill: Roman Monody, Cantata and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (Oxford, 1997)
HOWARD E. SMITHER/R