History of Italian Ballet
from Renaissance Masters to Contemporary Stardom

The Origins: From Dolce Stil Novo to the Trecento

Between the late thirteenth and the fourteenth century, technical ballet did not yet exist. Yet within the cultivated rituals of the urban bourgeoisie and in the verses of Dante and Boccaccio, the indissoluble bond between poetry, music, and gesture took shape. With the ballata and the saltarello, the city became the laboratory of the moving body, laying the foundations of musical rhythm itself.

The Renaissance

The Cradle of Dance in Italy

Contrary to what some still believe, the roots of ballet do not lie in France, but in the Italian Renaissance courts. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, cities such as Florence, Milan, Ferrara, and Mantua became laboratories of elegance, where dance ceased to be merely a popular pastime and became a codified art: the Ballo Nobile.

It was in Italy that the first theoretical manuals were written, thanks to visionary dancing masters such as Domenico da Piacenza (author of De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi), Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, and Antonio Cornazzano. These treatise writers elevated dance to the status of an exact science, distinguishing between the solemn Bassadanza, in which nobles processed with gliding steps to display magnificence, and the livelier Saltarello, of popular origin but refined for the court. Dance thus became a fundamental political instrument. To know how to dance meant to know how to govern one’s body — and, by reflection, the State.

The Patriarch of Dance: Domenico da Piacenza

The founder of the Italian school of dance was Domenico da Piacenza (also known as Domenichino da Ferrara). Living between 1390 and 1470, Domenico was the key figure who transformed dance from simple entertainment into a recognized profession. Active at the most refined courts of Italy — particularly the Este court in Ferrara and the Sforza court in Milan — he held the position of salaried court master, responsible not only for dancing but for devising choreographies for state celebrations, becoming a true architect of political festivity.

He accomplished the revolutionary cultural operation of elevating dance to the rank of Liberal Art, placing it on the same level as music and painting. This vision is crystallized in his treatise De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi, the first modern theoretical work on dance. The text is divided into two parts: a theoretical section, in which he analyzes movement and measure with mathematical rigor, and a practical section, preserving the notation of seventeen dances and five basse danze, fundamental for understanding the aesthetics of the period.

The social legitimation sought by Domenico reached its highest recognition when he was appointed Knight (probably of the Order of the Golden Spur), an exceptionally rare honor for a man not born noble, definitively affirming the dignity of the artist. His artistic legacy is also testified by his collaboration with his pupil Guglielmo, with whom he shared the stage on memorable occasions — such as the lavish Milanese festivities of 1455 celebrating the betrothal of Ippolita Sforza — when master and disciple displayed to the world the perfection of the new Italian dance.

The Architect of Harmony: Guglielmo Ebreo

Domenico da Piacenza’s most distinguished pupil was Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro (1420–1484), a central figure of the fifteenth century who transformed dance into a codified science. Deeply influenced by the Neoplatonic climate of the Medici court, he elevated dance to a mirror of cosmic harmony. Every movement was to be the outward manifestation of inner spiritual motion, perfectly concordant with music. This search for sublimation of gesture found its fullest expression in his treatise De pratica seu arte tripudii vulgare opusculum.

In his treatise, Guglielmo identified six indispensable rules for the perfect dancer: Misura (musicality and tempo), Memoria (memory and concentration), Partire del terreno (geometrical management of space), and Aiere (grace, lightness, and the visible undulation of breath), among others.

Guglielmo classified with precision the musical and choreutic genres of his time. The Bassadanza was the undisputed queen: a “low” dance — meaning without jumps or aerial evolutions — in which the feet never left the ground. Couples moved with extreme sobriety, executing gliding steps and a continuous play of rising and lowering the body.

If the Bassadanza represented solemnity, the Saltarello embodied its energetic and vital counterpart. Of ancient origin, it was ennobled by masters such as Cornazzano and characterized by a lively triple meter that allowed dancers to break the static composure of slower dances.

Today, although its original ritual function has faded in rural contexts, the Saltarello is experiencing a phase of rediscovery. Italian cultivated music has also paid homage to it, as demonstrated by Gioachino Rossini, who composed the Saltarello all’italiana in Volume V of his Péchés de vieillesse.

Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro’s career was also marked by a strategic turning point: he converted to Christianity, assuming the name Giovanni Ambrosio, a decision that opened the doors to knighthood in the Order of the Golden Spur and to refined courts such as that of the Montefeltro in Urbino.

The Poet of Dance: Antonio Cornazzano

If Domenico da Piacenza was the founder and Guglielmo the systematizer, Antonio Cornazzano (1430–1484) represents the humanist intellectual who definitively consecrated dance as an art worthy of princes. In his celebrated Libro dell’arte del dançare (1455), he codified the same principles as his master, placing them within a broader literary framework. The fact that a man capable of writing on military strategy (De re militari) devoted himself to dance demonstrates how essential dancing was for the political formation of the aristocracy.

From the Renaissance to Mannerism: The Triumph of Spectacle

With the advent of Mannerism, dance underwent a profound metamorphosis. It was no longer merely a social art but became the beating heart of the “Court Festival.” In Milan, Leonardo da Vinci designed moving stage sets for the famous Festa del Paradiso (1490). In Florence, the Medici magnified their power through the sumptuous Intermedi. It was an Italian woman, Catherine de’ Medici, who exported this model across the Alps, laying the foundations of the French ballet de cour.

The Seventeenth Century: Dance in the Age of Melodrama

With the advent of the Baroque and the birth of Opera in music, dance in Italy temporarily lost its autonomy in order to serve the new dominant art form. In the seventeenth century, ballet was not yet an independent spectacle but an essential component of the “Theatrical Festival” and of dramma per musica, conceived to create absolute parity between sound, gesture, and scenography.

In Venice, Rome, and Turin, operas regularly included these danced insertions. They did not necessarily serve a narrative function but aimed to astonish the audience: the so-called balli di intermezzo or grand final scenes, where Baroque stage machinery lowered clouds and divinities from above. This interpenetration of singing and movement was not accidental; it responded to a precise intellectual ambition: the rebirth of the ancient Greek model. The restoration of dance was a philological recovery of that total unity of the arts which defined classical tragedy.

The Legacy of Opera: From the Stage to the Small Screen

If we observe the evolution of spectacle across the centuries, we realize that the deep structure of entertainment has not changed since Greek tragedy or Baroque melodrama: only the medium has changed. That total fusion of singing, acting, and dance — once housed in the opera theatre — found in the twentieth century a new home: Television. Ancient arie became modern songs, almost always accompanied by choreography: televised “ballets” are nothing more than the evolution of seventeenth-century danced intermezzi.

The Baroque: Institution and Triumph of the Stage

In the seventeenth century, ballet ceased to be merely festivity and became representation of absolutist power. Integrated into the new genre of opera, dance became architecture in motion, magnified by the prodigious stage machinery of Italian engineers, while expatriate masters codified the vocabulary we still use today.

The Eighteenth Century: Intermezzi and Reforms

The eighteenth century marked a turning point. While Opera Seria sought to purify drama, dance found new vitality precisely “in the empty spaces” between acts (danced intermezzi) and often became the principal attraction. In Italy, a style developed characterized by strong technical virtuosity.

Salvatore Viganò: The Prince of the Coreodramma

If there is one name that embodies the perfect synthesis of Italian artistic genius between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is Salvatore Viganò. Born in Naples and nephew of the great composer Luigi Boccherini, Viganò revolutionized the stage with the Coreodramma. Until then, ballet had often consisted of virtuosic sequences detached from narrative; Viganò swept away these conventions. In his theatre, pantomime fused with dance in a continuous flow of emotion.

The Teatro alla Scala became his temple. Colossal works such as I Titani were not mere ballets but mythological epics in which music and gesture became a single universal language. At his death, he was mourned as a national hero, and the title “Prince of the Coreopei” engraved on his tomb marked the unreachable summit of this total art.

Eighteenth Century and Arcadia: The Ballet d’Action

From rigid Baroque symmetry emerged expressive truth. The dancer became a silent actor. Thanks to figures such as Gasparo Angiolini and Salvatore Viganò, the “ballet pantomime” and the coreodramma were born: gesture replaced the word, and dance no longer interrupted action but became action itself.

The Enlightenment: Ballet Between Reform and Autonomy

In the fervent climate of the Enlightenment, the body was freed from cumbersome costumes in order to express authentic emotion. Dance adopted the language of theatrical reform associated with Calzabigi and gradually detached itself from melodrama, conquering major Italian theatres with complete and fully independent plots.

Rococo: The Transition Toward Grace

The dancer lightened weight and refined speed. It was the age of brilliant virtuosity, curved lines, and Italian wit embodied by stars such as “La Barbarina.” Rococo prepared the body to confront the technical challenges of the following century, blending noble art with the celebrated dancer of “mezzo carattere.”

Neoclassicism: Purity and Monumentality (1760–1810)

Driven by archaeological discoveries, the body looked back to antiquity and became sculpture. In theatres such as La Scala in Milan, ballet structured itself into rigorous hierarchies (soloists and corps de ballet). It was the era of grand “living tableaux,” vertical posture, and absolute discipline.

The Nineteenth Century: The Ballo Grande and the Italian School

The nineteenth century was the golden age of Italian technique. While Paris celebrated the ethereal Romantic ballet of sylphs, Italy — and especially the Teatro alla Scala in Milan — became the academy of the world. Thanks to the theorist Carlo Blasis, who rigorously codified technique (inventing the classical attitude as we know it), Italian dancers became famous for their physical strength, rapid turns, and stability on pointe.

In the second half of the century, Italy produced a unique phenomenon: the Ballo Grande. Its greatest exponent was Luigi Manzotti with his celebrated Excelsior (1881). These were not intimate ballets but monumental spectacles celebrating progress, science, national unity, and industrialization, employing hundreds of performers, live elephants on stage, and the first electric lighting effects. During this period, Italian ballet dominated the scene to such an extent that even operas by Giuseppe Verdi (written for Paris, such as I Vespri Siciliani or Don Carlo) were required to include extensive dance sequences.

Romanticism: Pointe Work and the Myth of the Ballerina

Gravity was defeated: the Italian Maria Taglioni rose onto pointe and changed the history of the art. Amid enchanted forests and ethereal creatures, the woman became the absolute dramatic center. At the same time, in Milan, the great Carlo Blasis codified scientifically and definitively the technique of classical ballet.

Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: Crisis and Reinvention

From the positivist and colossal triumph of Excelsior to the angular modernist fracture of Futurism. While Italian dancers exported the legendary 32 fouettés to Tsarist Russia, at home dance passed through Symbolism, Verismo, and the avant-garde, ultimately preserved by the immortal rigor of the Cecchetti Method.

The Twentieth Century: Crisis and Rebirth

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Italian primacy experienced a temporary setback with the revolution of the Ballets Russes (which nevertheless employed the Italian master Enrico Cecchetti). In Italy, ballet risked becoming a weary appendix of opera, burdened by the now outdated weight of the Manzotti tradition. Yet a new reaction was imminent.

Futurist Dance: Mechanical Utopia and Its Limits

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Futurism launched its incendiary provocation. In 1917, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed the death of the “glorious Italian ballet.” The radical Futurist proposal was that dance should no longer be grace or harmony but imitation of the Machine. “One must imitate with gestures the movements of engines,” wrote Marinetti. The aim was the fusion of man with mechanics, the attainment of a dissonant, abrasive, anti-graceful, and asymmetrical “metallic” dance. Even music was to be banished in favor of Noise, orchestrated by Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori.

In the midst of wartime, Futurist dance proposed to glorify war through three new creations: the Dance of the Shrapnel, the Dance of the Machine Gun, and finally the Dance of the Aviator, simulating aerial maneuvers. Yet these theories remained sterile. Transforming the dancer into a belligerent automaton deprived choreographic art of its emotional essence. They remained a curious intellectual parenthesis destined to extinguish itself rapidly.

Postwar Humanism and Stardom

Once the noisy avant-garde interlude closed, Italian dance rediscovered its soul. True rebirth came in the second postwar period: the major Opera Houses (Teatro alla Scala, Opera di Roma, San Carlo) refounded their ballet schools as workshops of technical excellence.

The symbol of this new era was Carla Fracci. In clear opposition to the Futurist automaton, Fracci restored the human being to the center of the stage, combining steel technique with profoundly moving interpretative depth. With her, ballet left its ivory towers and returned to being an art loved by the masses.

This symbolic relay, beginning with the Renaissance masters, is today carried forward by stars such as Roberto Bolle. A figure who transcends the role of mere dancer, Bolle has succeeded in bringing the noble Italian tradition beyond theatre walls — into public squares and onto television screens.

If once dance served to magnify the courts of princes, today it uses new media pulpits to speak to all, demonstrating that the harmony of the body — codified centuries ago by Guglielmo Ebreo and Domenico da Piacenza — remains a universal and eternal language, so long at least as there is someone to tell its story.

The Twentieth Century: New Identities of Italian Dance

The operatic and academic tradition does not disappear but coexists with abstraction and dance-theatre. Between undisputed global étoiles such as Carla Fracci, the scores of the giants of the Generation of the Eighties, and the explosion of independent companies, the century demonstrates the inexhaustible capacity of Italian dance to regenerate itself.