Giovanni Battista Casti

Giovanni Battista Casti lived a life woven through the intellectual and political salons of Enlightenment Europe. A defrocked priest, he turned his clerical training into a weapon for satire, his verse dissecting the hypocrisies of the powerful with a surgeon's precision. He found patronage in the courts of Vienna and St. Petersburg, moving in the orbits of emperors and composers, including Salieri, who set his librettos to music. Casti's most famous work, 'Gli Animali Parlanti' (The Talking Animals), is a sprawling political allegory that mocked European monarchies so effectively it was banned in several states. He wrote comic opera librettos that were successes in their time, but his lasting legacy is that of a literary provocateur, a poet who used humor and animal fables as a thin veil for serious, and often dangerous, political criticism.