Giovanni Emanuele Bidera (or Bideri) (4 October 1784 – 8 April 1858) was an Italian writer. He is primarily known as the librettist of Gaetano Donizetti's operas Gemma di Vergy and Marino Faliero, but he also wrote many other librettos for lesser known composers as well as plays, essays, books about Naples, and a treatise on acting. Bidera was born in the small Sicilian town of Palazzo Adriano and spent most of his career in Naples. In 1850 he retired to Palermo where he died at the age of 73. Biography Bidera was born in Palazzo Adriano, now a commune of Palermo. According to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, his family were of humble origins. However, according to an 1986 article on Bidera's life and work written by his great-great-grandson, Luciano Villevieille Bideri, the Bideri were a noble Arbëreshë family who later fell on hard times. Bidera was one of the seven children of Baroness Anna Dara and Count Pietro Atanasio Bideri. In his childhood and adolescence, the family owned a large palazzo on the Piazza Beati Paoli in Palermo and another in Palazzo Adriano on the main piazza (now called Piazza Umberto I) as well as numerous houses and land in the town and its surroundings. Because of his father's support for King Ferdinand IV, the family lost virtually all their holdings when the king was deposed in 1806. Giovanni Emanuele did not share his father's conservative views and support for the Bourbon rulers of Sicily and Naples which caused considerable friction between them. In 1799 and in the hope of modifying the young man's revolutionary sympathies, his father had sent him to the Eastern Rite seminary in Palermo. However, the seminary brought him into contact with other young men who shared his views and reinforced them. After yet another serious quarrel with his father, he ran away at the age of 18 intending study law at the university in Naples. Unable to make a living there and deeply in debt, he went back to Sicily and worked as an actor and set designer for a traveling theatre troupe. He also began writing plays. During his various peregrinations with the theatre troupe, which also included multiple sojourns in Naples, he met Giacoma Schultz, a Sicilan woman of Swiss origin. They married in 1812 and over the next 20 years had five children. Bidera and his young family settled in