Tempio in lode di Flavia Peretti Orsini

Towards the end of 1591, at the Giovanni Martinelli press in Rome, a substantial anthology of poems was published under the title Tempio fabricato da diversi coltissimi, & nobiliss. ingegni, in lode dell’illust.ma & ecc.ma donna Flavia Peretta Orsina, duchessa di Bracciano. Dedicatole da Uranio Fenice, the name being a pseudonym for Tasso, who had just returned from a stay in Mantua and was shortly to leave for Naples. Attending to an anthology of poems is hardly consonant with the travels of a restless poet but may be explained by Tasso’s desire to pay homage, after the Gonzagas and the Medici, to two of the most powerful families of Rome, namely that of Pope Sixtus V Peretti, who died in 1590, and the Orsini family, given that Flavia Peretti was the wife of Virginio Orsini, to whom Tasso later dedicated a couple of compositions (see Rime, 1489-90). The 1591 anthology included, as was typical in anthologies of the time, the work of both well-known and lesser poets, all from Rome, and included a large section of anonymous poems. Tasso himself opens the anthology with a series of madrigals based on the metaphor of the temple, and with an epithalamium dedicated to the couple (Rime, 1466).