Francesco Florimo

[1] There he studied with Nicola Antonio Zingarelli and Giacomo Tritto and met Vincenzo Bellini, a student companion who became a lifelong friend and the recipient of Florimo's fervent devotion.

It claimed to be based on the teaching methods of the castrato Girolamo Crescentini, who was still head of the Naples Conservatory singing school at the time, and was meant to restore the 'antico bello', or true Italian style of singing from the time of Alessandro Scarlatti, Nicola Porpora, and Francesco Durante, which had been largely supplanted by the then fashionable 'la moda barocca'.

Among his later compositions, most notable are the Sinfonia funebre per la morte di Bellini (Milan, 1836) and his songs, many of which are in a popular Neapolitan style.

[1] In 1826 Florimo became archivist-librarian of the Naples Conservatory, and under his direction the library acquired much of the bulk of its extraordinarily rich holdings, including precious music manuscripts and other archival material pertaining above all to masters of the Neapolitan school.

His will donated to the Naples Conservatory thirty-seven volumes of correspondence, a rich source of material that has not yet been fully exploited; among these documents are some which reveal Florimo's own published fabrications.