Giacomo Meyerbeer his family. He arrived in Italy at the beginning of 1816, after visits to Paris and London, where he heard Cramer play. In Paris, he wrote to a friend, 'I go from museum to museum, library to library, theatre to theatre, with the restlessness of the Wandering Jew'. During his years in Italy Meyerbeer became acquainted with, and impressed by, the works of his contemporary Gioachino Rossini, who by 1816, at the age of 24, was already director of both major opera houses in Naples and in the same year premiered his operas "The Barber of Seville" and "Otello". Meyerbeer
Gioachino Rossini wife died in 1845, and on 16 August 1846, he married Olympe Pélissier, who had sat for Vernet for his picture of "Judith and Holofernes". Political disturbances compelled Rossini to leave Bologna in 1848. After living for a time in Florence, he settled in Paris in 1855, where he hosted many artistic and literary figures in his apartment at 2 Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin. Among them was the forty years younger Belgian mattauphone virtuoso Edmond Michotte, whom Rossini considered his "quasi figlio". Rossini had been a well-known gourmand and an excellent amateur chef his entire life, but he indulged these