Seventeenth century Rome was an unparalleled musical Mecca: a concentration of both genius and patronage unknown elsewhere. For the modern world, Rome has remained somewhat in the shadow of Monteverdi’s Venice, partly because of the presence of that greatest leader of the musical world, and equally because of the presence in Venice (and the absence in Rome) of a powerful musical printing press. Our purpose in this program is to give a glimpse of Rome’s musical life from the early 17th century under the patronage of the Barberini family and led by the composers Giacomo Carissimi and Luigi Rossi, to the first decade of the 18th century when the young Saxon Lion, George Frideric Handel burst onto the Roman musical scene.