Singing is one of the most appreciated and respected art forms by Italians. Opera began in Italy around 1600, and is still a huge part of the Italian spirit. Italians are zealous for opera and good singing in general. The composers' images appear on national postage stamps, and the streets of each city are named after the musicians. Almost every small town has its own opera house, and opera is regularly programmed on Italian radio and television. The fame of music in Italy did not blossom overnight. It progressed over time through the innovative minds of brilliant Italian composers and a developing social hierarchy. The development of Italian song can best be traced through the composers who brought it to light. The first composers wrote for the theater. The accompanied solo song, which today we call the "art song", was unable to compete with the splendor of the opera and therefore had little interest as a musical form. With a few exceptions, the art song remained dormant from about 1725 to 1850. Before then, most Italian musical literature was drawn from operas. Many of the songs that are performed today as "art songs" are actually arias from early Italian operas. The composers, with the exception of Barbara Strozzi, concentrated mainly on their operatic literature. The Italian art song of the 17th and 18th centuries was a showcase for the voice, exploiting its musical and technical abilities. For this reason, these songs focus very little on the fusion of poetic and musical elements, but are instead inclined to feature the voice as the primary performance medium. In most early Italian music, the accompaniment involves the support of the voice and little more, even if it is difficult to do anything other than generalize...... middle of paper ......precise place in the history of music and and is not in danger of losing its status any time soon. Bibliography Bowers, Jane M. and Judith Tick. Women Making Music: The Western Artistic Tradition, 1150-1950. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Coffin, Berton, and Werner Singer. Singer's repertoire, vol. 5. 2nd ed. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962. Kimball, Carol. Song: A Guide to Art Song Style and Literature. Rev. ed. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2005.Lakeway, Ruth C. and Robert C. White. Italian art song. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. MacClintock, Carol. The solo song. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1973.Rosand, Ellen. "Barbara Strozzi, virtuous cantaprice: The voice of the composer." Journal of the American Musicological Society 31:2 (1978): 241-281.Sadie, Stanley. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. New York: Grove's Music Dictionaries, 1992.