ATALANTE presents Milton in Love: The Birth of Opera, Oratorio, and Cantata in the Eternal City. The concert’s repertoire draws on music commissioned by the Barberini family (the poet pope, Urban VIII and his highly cultivated nephews) with dramatic cantatas, laments and scenes from opera and oratorio by Luigi Rossi, Marco Marazzoli, Domenico Mazzocchi and Rossi’s inspiration, Claudio Monteverdi. The period 1620–1660 reached new heights of realism, sensuality, ecstasy and eroticism which was the essence of the new style first awakened in Rome and later came to be known as ‘Baroque’.