A Canadian in Italy at the End of the Enlightenment: Rossini’s La cambiale di matrimonio
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Italians may have been among the first to discover Canada, but it must be said that it took them a very long time to discover Canadians.For several centuries, it would seem, travel agencies provided would-be tourists with only one-way tickets to Canada, and if the French and the English, who were fighting for its possession, could at least benefit from the reports that their governors in North America were routinely filing with their parent governments, the Italians had to rely on old chronicles, occasional reports to the Vatican provided by a few Italian clergymen in Canada (such as Father Bressani)!and, at a later stage, a few popular novels by the likes of Chateaubriand and Fenimore Cooper.? It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the first Canadians to reach, as it were, Italy was a fictional character by the unlikely name of Slook.He showed up in Italy for the first time in 1790 in a comedy by Camillo Federici (the pseudonym of Giovan Battista Viassolo).3The comedy which featured him as the protagonist, La cambiale di matrimonio, must have been popular in its day, for it convinced Slook to start an operatic career.And so in 1807, Federici's five-act comedy was reduced to a farcical one-act libretto by Giuseppe Checcherini, and Slook travelled to Rome to appear in an opera by Carlo Coccia, II matrimonio per lettera di cambio.Unfortunately, it was a flop.4Undaunted and confident in himself, Mr. Slook awaited a better occasion.SO Being a businessman, he knew that in order to succeed one must take risks.So in 1810 he trusted the Marchese Cavalli, when the latter had been stood up by a German composer, and decided to gamble on the talents of an eighteen-year old boy, the son of a trumpet player.The two of them travelled to Venice, where Gaetano Rossi had refashioned the twenty-year old play in a new libretto, and Rossini and Slook met.They obviously liked each other for, a few days later, the score was ready and, on November 3, La cambiale di matrimonio was performed.It was a success.Rossini was paid over 200 Liras and, as a dutiful son, he sent the money to his mother.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".