#gipsies

In Rome the Carnival, more joyous, and even more fan- tastical than in Florence, was of a ruder character, and was occasionally rendered, through the influence of the Papal Government, the medium of the most fearful bigotry.* But the popular entertainment on these occasions was called " Le Zingaresche, " and consisted of comic dialogues, in which a gipsy, or a group of gipsies, engaged in a " fierce encounter of the wits," and told fortunes, revealed love- secrets, and exercised the craft of legerdemain with what skill they might. These dialogues gradually assumed a dramatic form, and were rather sung than spoken, to such accompaniment on the guitar as the ambulatory troop could procure. In the early part of the seventeenth century, an elegant innovation in the Carnival festivities of Rome was intro- duced by Quagliate, the composer, which is notable as the first secular musical drama, or opera, ever exhibited in that city, and as giving an idea of the higher festivities of the Carnival at the particular period when Salvator Rosa be- came one of its most brilliant ornaments. "My master Quagliate," says the quaint and amusing traveller Della Valle, "introduced a new species of music into the churches of Rome, not only in compositions for a single voice, but for two, three, four, and often more voices in choruses, ending with a numerous crowd of many choruses singing together, specimens of which may be seen in many of his motets that have been since printed; and the music of my car, or moveable, during the Carnival, com- posed by the same Quagliate in my own room, chiefly in the manner he found most agreeable to me, and performed in masks through the streets of Kome during the Carnival of 1606, was the first dramatic action or representation in music that had ever been heard in that city. Though no more than five voices or five instruments were employed, (the exact number which an ambulant car could contain,) yet these afforded great variety; as, besides the dialogue of * The particular Rioni, or quarters of Rome, were noted for giving, during the Carnival, mock exhibitions of the trials and executions of Jews. The stages on which these sanguinary scenes were enacted were drawn by oxen. The actors appeared to hang, strangle, or torture the unfortunate victims of Christian hatred after the manner of the Inquisition, for the edification of the faithful. These representations were called "Le Giu-