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To this end, this overview provides a chronological outline of some of the most significant moments in Italian theatrical expression from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval Theater Two forms of theatrical expression in early medieval Italy merit discussion as a starting point for this overview: secular mimes of the minstrel tradition and sacre rappresentazioni, or religious dramas. The Contrasto by Cielo d’Alcamo is an example of a kind of minstrel mime in dialogue form that seems written for performance.

Among them were musicians and mathematicians like Vincenzo Galilei (1520–1591), an illustrious composer and father of Galileo; Jacopo Peri (1561–1633); and Ottavio Rinuccini (1562–1621), who wrote the first opera librettos. This group developed the theory and first examples of melodrama, in which words and music played equal parts, and the music was meant to be an interpretation of the words. Melodrama was perhaps the genre that best answered the new taste for glamour and grandiosity. Also typical were pastoral themes and settings, which were fashionable among the aristocratic audiences.

Veronica was a sixteenthcentury courtesan poetess who lived in Venice. She was the daughter of a prostitute who brought her onto the streets when she was only fifteen. But the intelligent Veronica wants to learn and thus begins to study on her own and manages to achieve a level of erudition, an extremely rare accomplishment among street prostitutes. From prostitute, she transforms herself into a courtesan, a more elegant job to define a woman who does not sell herself on the street or in brothels but rather in rich salons with the most important members of the aristocracy and the clergy of her city.