The city of Naples first rose to notoriety under the ‘Gothic’ rule of the Angevins (1266–1443) when its most celebrated representative, King Robert, filled his court with cosmopolitans. The poet Boccaccio tells us that many found a joie de vivre in Naples—‘gay, flourishing and peaceful under a single sovereign’—preferring it to the free but harassed Republic of Florence. It was, however, under the Spanish Viceroys, headed by Pedro de Toledo in 1536, that Naples began to assume its theatrical style, such as we know today. The character of the Spaniards, with their intense religiosity and the importance they attached to pomp and ceremony, was attuned to the Neapolitans. There reigned a kind of peace, nurtured by wealth and grandeur, perhaps because the noblemen took pleasure in competing with each other. There was employment for artists of all kinds and many of the seventeenth-century sculptor-architects came from Northern Italy. Similarly, early in the eighteenth century, composers headed for the colourful South—the city had already become a centre of the musical world.