most natural route into Italy would be by the Brenner, the historic road of
all German pilgrims.

Handel may well have been glad to leave Hamburg, but Hamburg did not forget
him. He is mentioned in a theatrical manifesto of 1708 as being already
"beloved and celebrated in Italy"; Barthold Feind, one of the Hamburg
librettists, who in 1715 translated Handel's _Rinaldo_, called him "the
incomparable Handel, the Orpheus of our time"; and from 1715 to 1734 almost
all of Handel's London operas were represented on the Hamburg stage.




CHAPTER II

Arrival in Italy--_Rodrigo_--Rome: Cardinal Ottoboni and the
Scarlattis--Naples: Venice: _Agrippina_--appointment at Hanover--London:
_Rinaldo_.


Handel spent three years in Italy. The known facts about his life there are
singularly few, and his biographers have often had to draw copiously on
their imagination. They may perhaps be forgiven for doing so, since they
rightly sought to emphasise the fact that these three years were the most
formative period of Handel's personality as a composer. Handel came to
Italy as a German; he left Italy an Italian, as far as his music was
concerned, and, despite all other influences, Italian was the foundation of
his musical language until the end of his life.

On January 14, 1707, a Roman chronicler noted the arrival of "a Saxon, an