decree to permit the performance of the opera. The libretto Denzio wrote for his Don Juan opera is unusual for its time in mixing comic and serious scenes into the main fabric of the drama. His designation for the work, a rappresentazione morale ("morality play") is probably unique for an opera of this era. After the libretto "reform" of the turn of the 18th century, it was not customary to mix serious and comic action in opera librettos. If comic action were to be included in an evening's entertainment, it would usually be confined to comic intermezzi that were presented between the acts of a serious drama. Denzio's drama preserves the mixing of serious and comic action that would be more typical of 17th-century Venetian librettos. This trait is invited, of course, by the subject matter and his obvious literary model, the play Il convitato di pietra by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini, the prototype dramatization for Italian versions of the Don Juan tale, considered much more vulgar than the Spanish drama of Tirso de Molina. Most operas with serious action from the 1720s and 1730s are set in the distant past (usually no later than the period of the European Dark Ages). Denzio did not precisely identify the time period for his Don Juan drama, but cultural and political references clearly indicate early modern times. Although the characters are mainly Spaniards, the action is set entirely in the Kingdom of Naples, which was ruled by members or allies of Spanish royal houses for centuries. No score for the opera survives. Its music was a pasticcio of arias borrowed from other operas. Most of them were taken from works by Antonio Caldara, as indicated by Denzio in the preface to his libretto. Caldara is not named directly, rather he is merely hinted at. It is possible that Denzio concealed the borrowings due to Caldara's position in the musical establishment of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in Vienna, which could have put Caldara in a position to retaliate for the unauthorized use of his music (Prague at that time was under the authority of Charles VI, who held the title King of Bohemia). From the texts preserved in surviving copies of the libretto, it has been possible to identify a few of the Caldara arias used in La pravità castigata (at least one other aria appears to have been borrowed from an opera