Italian opera "Dafne" by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today. Peri's works, however, did not arise out of a creative vacuum in the area of sung drama. An underlying prerequisite for the creation of opera proper was the practice of monody. Monody is the solo singing/setting of a dramatically conceived melody, designed to express the emotional content of the text it carries, which is accompanied by a relatively simple sequence of chords rather than other polyphonic parts. Italian composers began composing in this style late in the 16th century, and it grew in part from the long-standing
Giovanni Jacopo Spada neither "sports of Nature" nor the products of the biblical Great Deluge, but "antediluvian". He was listed among the subscribers to the corpus of Latin inscriptions assembled at Verona (and other north Italian locations), the "Museum Veronense hoc est antiquarum inscriptionum atque anaglyphorum..." (Verona 1749). Though Spada is barely remembered today, he was commemorated in the snail "Candidula spadae", described by Pietro Calcara in 1845. Giovanni Jacopo Spada Giovanni Jacopo Spada (1680 - 1774) was an Italian naturalist and pioneering geologist, born in Verona, who served for many years as archipresbyter at Graz in Styria. He is known for the