Gaetano Grossatesta, an Eighteenth‐Century Italian Choreographer and Impresario, Part One

An acquaintance with the now almost unknown artistic life of Gaetano Grossatesta, who lived from about 1700 to about 1774,1 helps to throw light on some of the more obscure areas of the history of Italian dance and its language. In the course of an artistic career lasting at least fifty years, he witnessed considerable changes in dance techniques and taste, carefully watching the European scene and promoting new choreographic tendencies. After working for more than twenty years in the most important northern Italian theatres as choreographer and dancer, he moved to Naples toward the middle of the eighteenth century and eventually became the brilliant impresario of the prestigious Teatro di San Carlo. Grossatesta began his activity at the time of the publication of Benedetto Marcello's II teatro alla moda (1720), an implacable and ironically satiric fresco of eighteenth-century operatic theatre with shrewd comments on dance. His career developed along with the flowering of

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