How long Handel stayed at Naples we do not know; all
that Mainwaring tells us is that he was taken up by a Spanish princess,
but, as Naples had belonged to Spain for a hundred and fifty years, Spanish
princesses can have been no rarities there, and it is impossible to
identify this lady.
From July 1708 until December 1709 we lose sight of Handel entirely. On
December 26, the first night of the carnival season, his opera _Agrippina_
was produced at Venice. The libretto was by Cardinal Grimani, who had
already written other dramas for music, all produced, like Handel's, at the
Teatro San Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice. Venice was the first city which
had undertaken opera on a commercial basis, open to the public on payment,
whereas in other places it depended for many years on the munificence of
princes and nobles. At Venice there existed not one theatre, but several,
devoted to opera, each called after the name of the parish in which it was
situated, and, of these, the theatre of St. John Chrysostom, built by the
Grimani family and still standing (though much remodelled) under the name
of Teatro Malibran, was the largest and most important. The Inquisition
took a more tolerant view of opera than the Pope; a Venetian preacher
admonished actors and singers to remember that they "were abominated of
God, but tolerated by the Government by desire of those who took delight in
their iniquities.
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