This article deals with the stage design of the opera Il Sant’Alessio by Stefano Landi and Giulio Rospigliosi. The opera was staged in the Palazzo Barberini on the Via delle Quattro Fontane in 1632 and 1634. Opera performances were an integral part of the spectacles through which the Barberini sought to consolidate their own power in Rome and increase the authority of the Catholic Church. Therefore, the visual aspect of opera was of great importance. Francesco Guitti, who was invited to stage the opera, designed sets and machinery that were a novelty in seventeenth-century Rome. The surviving documents (especially François Collignon’s engravings printed in the score and Guitti’s sketches of the machinery) make it possible to reconstruct the production of Il Sant’Alessio.
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