Cosimo III does not seem to have frequented Pratolino, but his son Prince Ferdinando, who even as a child showed an extraordinary talent for music, had a special love for the place. He sang well and played various instruments, and to his father’s anger often spent the carnival in Venice when no less than six theatres were open, four for opera, two for prose. An old writer tells us “he was such a master of counterpoint that a most difficult sonata being put before him at Venice, not only did he read it off at sight, but to the astonishment of all played it through from memory afterwards.” After his marriage with Violante of Bavaria he decided to build a theatre at Pratolino, the big room there being unfit for the operas he wished to give. He called in the architect who rebuilt the cathedral at Pescia, Antonio Ferri, and an admirable theatre was erected on the third floor of the villa, the Prince himself directed the painting of the scenery and the making of the stage machinery. He corresponded with composers, singers and poets, and often suggested changes in the _libretti_, or the addition of a song for the reigning favourite of the hour. An army of singers and musicians were in his pay and several musical critics, whose duty it was to travel from city to city in search of fresh talent. Every year saw the birth of at least one new opera, and Scarlatti composed no less than five for Pratolino. In a long letter to Prince Ferdinando about one called Lucio Manlio, he explains: “where it is marked _grave_ I do not mean _melancolico_, where _andante_ not _presto_ but _arioso_, where _allegro_ not _precipitoso_, where _allegrissimo_ not so fast as to exhaust the singers and drown the words, where _andante lento_, I exclude the pathetic, but desire a charming vagueness which should not lose the _arioso_; and none of the airs are to be melancholy. In my theatrical compositions I have always attempted to make the first act as it were, a child beginning to learn how to walk, the second, a youth already sure of himself, the third, a young man who gallantly attempts, and by his ardour succeeds, in every undertaking. Thus have I done in Lucio Manlio, the eighty-eighth opera composed by me in less than thirty-three years, which I should like to crown as the Queen of all the others. If I have failed to succeed, at least I have had the courage to attempt this; let Your Highness deign to accept it as Your vassal; as a maiden forlorn and homeless, to be guarded from the shocks and tricks of fortune....”