Marco Marcelliano Marcello (7 March 1818 – 23 July 1865) was an Italian writer and composer. He was particularly known for the opera libretti he wrote for the Italian composers Achille Peri, Carlo Pedrotti, and Antonio Cagnoni as well as his translations of French operas for their first performances in Italy, including Meyerbeer's L'Africaine. Biography Marcello was born in San Giovanni Lupatoto, a small town near Verona. He showed an early talent for music and poetry and at the age of 16 composed his first opera. His family sent him to Novara where he studied music and composition under Saverio Mercadante. He then followed Mercadante to Naples where he continued his studies in singing and composition and joined the circle of young writers around the writer and librettist Giovanni Emanuele Bidera. During that time, he composed two operas which were never performed. He also began working as a translator and librettist. He produced two librettos for operas by Carlo Pedrotti composed when Pedrotti was a student, Antigone and La sposa del villaggio, neither of which was ever performed. However, Pedrotti's Lina, again with a libretto by Marcello, premiered in Verona in 1840 to a favourable reception by both the audience and the critics. In 1839, Marcello had also completed the libretto for Mercadante's opera Il bravo when the original librettist, Gaetano Rossi, fell ill. His activities in the next few years included writing the libretto for Luigi Petrali's opera Sofonisba which premiered at La Scala in 1844 and translating the libretto of Halévy's opera La Juive into Italian, part of which was performed at the Teatro Regio di Parma in 1845. He left Naples during the 1848 uprisings and returned to Northern Italy. He spent some time in a villa on Lake Garda and then settled in Turin. He taught singing and piano there, and wrote music criticism for the journal Rivista contemporanea. In 1854 he also founded the journal, Il trovatore. In October 1859, after the French-Piedmontese troops had secured the city, Marcello moved to Milan where he spent the rest of his life. The 1850s and 60s saw the premieres of multiple operas with librettos by Marcello, including four more by Pedrotti, Achille Peri's Giuditta, and Filippo Marchetti's opera Romeo e Giulietta based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Unusually for Italian Romeo and Juliet operas, Marcello based the libretto's structure and narrative closely on Shakespeare's play rather than