This book is a pioneering attempt to explore the fascinating and hardly known realm of reciting
poetry in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The study of more than 50 treatises on both music and
poetry as well as other literary sources and documents from the period between 1300 and 1600
highlights above all the practice of parlar cantando («speaking through singing» - the term
found in De li contrasti a fourteenth-century treatise on poetry) as rooted in the art of
reciting verses. Situating the practice of parlar cantando in the context of late medieval
poetic delivery the author sheds new light on the origin and history of late Renaissance opera
style which their inventors called stile recitativo rappresentativo or exactly parlar
cantando. The deepest roots of the Italian tradition of parlar cantando are thus revealed and
the cultural background of the birth of opera is reinterpreted and revisited from the much
broader perspective of what appears to be the most important Italian mode of music making
between the age of Dante and Petrarch and the beginning of Italian opera around 1600.
