Italian classical music is difficult to do if everyone is singing a melody at the same time; thus, polyphony gave way to homophony, and early opera consisted of relatively simple melodies with texts about Greek mythology, sung in Italian and supported by simple harmonies. The important city in Italy in this development of music in the 16th century was Florence. (See also: Florentine Camerata, Vincenzo Galilei, Jacopo Peri, Palestrina, Arcangelo Corelli.) Besides Florence, two other Italian cities are particularly worthy of mention in the period around 1600. There is somewhat of a friendly rivalry between advocates of the two cities as to which
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