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October 13, 2021
By Robert Crowe
Giovanni Battista Velluti (1780–1861), or Giambattista, or even Gianni, as some of his friends seem to have called him, has been my constant companion since 2011. Back when I thought Angus Heriot’s 1956 The Castrati in Opera was a good, reliable source (was I ever so young?), Velluti’s wild life, full of saucy stories of flirtations—and more—with divas both operatic and aristocratic, of narrow escapes from their jealous boyfriends, of improbably witty badinage with emperors, queens, and skeptical policemen of all descriptions, was highly entertaining. But what really piqued my curiosity was his life and all of its collisions with the surrounding world—a stranger in a strange land—dragging all the accoutrements of the eighteenth century with him, deep into the nineteenth. Stared at, gossiped about, closely observed, lied about, mythologized, lionized, “monstered”—all while he was walking the same streets with those who were busily rewriting—and redrawing—his existence. I got to know him first as a newspaper figure, a caricature, but as I dug deeper, I found more and more sources that dug more deeply in the man himself.