and the Cardinals, his patrons. He became so attached to Rome, that it was difficult for him to leave it until the war which approached the city obliged him to take his way in the month of May or June, 1708, to Naples. One of the Italian cantatas entitled Partenza shows his grief at leaving the lovely banks, the dear walls, and the beautiful waters of the Tiber.
Soon after his arrival at Naples, Alessandro Scarlatti returned to settle there after seven years of absence.[1]
Thanks to this friendship, and his membership of the Arcadia, Handel was received into the best circles of Neapolitan society. He remained at Naples for nearly a year, from June, 1708, to the spring of 1709, enjoying princely hospitality, "which placed at his disposal," says Mainwaring, "a palace, a well-supplied table, and a coach." If the softness of the Italian life enervated him, he appears to have wasted no time. Not only did he assimilate the style of his friend Corelli—he conceived in Italy a passionate love of pictures[2]—but he attempted with a carefully cultivated dilettantism the most diverse styles, with which the cosmopolitan society of Naples amused its careless curiosity. Spanish and
- ↑ Scarlatti was attached to the Royal Chapel of Naples as principal Organist in December, 1708. Then he was reinstated in this post in January, 1709, and in the course of the same year he was nominated master of the Conservatoire of Poveri di Gesù Cristo.
- ↑ All his life one of his chief hobbies—as with Corelli and Hasse—was to visit picture galleries. It is necessary to note this visual intelligence with the great German and Italian musicians of this period, since one does not find it with those of the end of the eighteenth century.
