Remigio Romano's Collection of Lyrics for Music

When the subject of research into Italian solo song in the first half of the seventeenth century comes under discussion – in itself a rare enough event – such discussion is mostly limited to the Florentine style of solo song with chordal accompaniment, and its followers. The harmonic daring, the declamatory ideas, and the ornamental practices of such solo madrigals have proved more interesting to scholars than strophic, dance-like compositions, which have tended to be relegated to the sidelines as unimportant, at best entertaining, little tunes. Even Nigel Fortune, who argues in his highly convincing thesis, presented in several articles, that the Florentine style led only to a dead end, while the future of solo song lay in the strophic compositions, has not yet been able to rewrite the history books, immune as they seem to change.