La Scala has recently undertaken the systematic rediscovery of the Italian roots of melodrama. After looking to Venice (La Calisto by Cavalli and L’Orontea by Cesti) and Naples (Vinci’s Li zite ’ngalera), in 2025 the theatre presents an encounter of two of Italy’s premier poets, Pietro Metastasio and Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, with a Bohemian who made Venice his second home, Florian Leopold Gassman, court composer for Joseph II and Antonio Salieri’s teacher. The latter’s Opera seria, presented in Vienna in 1769 and here conducted by Christophe Rousset in a new production by Laurent Pelly with a stellar cast of young talents, is an irresistible satire of the theatre world that aptly conveys the koinè of the Gluckian reform, in which librettist Calzabigi figured prominently.