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P IER JACOPO MARTELLO (1665-1727) occupies a modest place in the history of the Italian theater. He is mainly remembered for his adoption and ardent advocacy of a fourteen-syllable rhyming line, imitative of the Alexandrine, that bears his name: verso martelliano. His admiration for Corneille and Racine, and for the French culture of the grand siecle tempered by a rueful pride in the past glories of Italy and a determination to help revive them places Martello at that historical juncture around 1700 when Italy was shaking off its Baroque hyperbolisms and preparing to join the rationalistic, cosmopolitan mainstream of modern Europe. It was the period of the founding of the Arcadian Academy, and Martello, under the shepherd's sobriquet of Mirtillo Dianidio, helped to establish the Arcadian colony in his native city of Bologna in 1698. He was to become a prominent representative of that movement and to gain the friendship of most of its guiding lights. Martello's early literary productions were lyric poems and (as he admits in the extract presented below) several librettos: II Perseo (Bologna, Teatro Malvezzi, 1697), music by various composers, stage designs by the brothers Galli Bibiena; La Tisbe, trattenimento per musica (Bologna, Teatro Malvezzi, 1697), composer unknown; L'Apollo geloso (Bologna, Teatro Formagliari, 1698), music by Perti (revived at least twice in later years); Gli amici, pastorale per musica (Bologna, Teatro Malvezzi, 1699), music by Count Pirro Albergati (revived in 1734 with music by Buini and others). He then turned to tragedy occultissimamente the deepest secrecy), as he tells us in a memoir, and eventually (in 1709) published four specimens, all in versi martelliani, as Volume I of his Teatro. There was much headshaking at his metrical innovation,
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