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connexions, and might perhaps have met Handel on one such visit – but there is no proof that he did so.
    Finances are a somewhat simpler issue. As a rule Baroque artists travelling in Italy were paid for by their patrons, who saw the tour as a species of talent investment, paying off in the resulting sophistications of style. Handel had no need of this. Money was forthcoming from his father’s estate, friends and family connexions rallied round, and Handel was able to leave for Italy ‘on his own bottom’, as Mainwaring has it. The word ‘bottom’ has the English eighteenth-century sense of ‘initiative’, ‘enterprise’ or ‘substance’. Once in Italy itself, the necessary bottom would have to be provided by his own creative resources, directly linked to the network of patronage, cronyism and contact-forming hardly less essential to Italian life now than it was in those days.
    His journey may have taken him through such musical centres as Munich, Turin and Milan, all of them with resident composers and flourishing operatic traditions, but he is first supposed to have halted for any length of time at Florence. The capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under the rule of Cosimo III,obsessively religious and increasingly preoccupied with the issue of a likely successor among his brood of wayward children, was not the culturally vibrant city it had been during the Renaissance, but music of all kinds gained enthusiastic support from the Grand Duke’s eldest surviving son Ferdinando. The prince had received a broad education, including practical courses on the violin and harpsichord from the Genoese composer Giovanni Maria Pagliardi. An anonymous contemporary notes that
    he also sang most gracefully . . . he liked operas, sad and serious ones for preference . . . he had his amusements for each season: in the spring he went to Poggio a Caiano, where he kept a troupe of comedians on purpose to act for him. Then he went to Villa Imperiale, where . . . the pages and courtiers improvised entertainments . . . In the autumn he went to his favourite villa at Pratolino . . . there he went hunting and there he had a musical drama acted by the choicest singers, with a great crowd of spectators. Other operas under his patronage were given at Leghorn, where he ‘gently obliged’ the richest merchants to buy all the tickets, lending his own orchestra, led by the virtuoso Martino Bitti. Besides this he was active in encouraging special performances of music for Holy Week in the Florentine churches, featuring new commissions. No wonder that when he died it was said of him that ‘the most musical prince in all the world is dead’.
    Nothing Handel composed on this first visit to Florence has survived and in the last days of 1706 we find him already in Rome. On 14 January 1707 the diarist Francesco Valesio noted that ‘there has arrived in this city a Saxon, a most excellent player on the harpsichord and composer, who today gave a flourish of his skill by playing the organ in the church of S. Giovanni *(b) to the amazement of everyone present’.
    It must have been at this time as well that he first heard the music of the pifferari , the Abruzzi shepherds whose tradition it was to play their bagpipes in the Roman streets during December and January. The simple tunes over their drone clearly made a deep impression: though this kind of one-note bass is a cliché of Baroque musical rusticity, the merest mention of sheep or shepherds,whether in ‘Quanto voi felici siete’ in Ezio or ‘But as for his people’ in Israel in Egypt , is enough to set the pastoral Handel going and a symphony labelled pifa duly introduces the shepherds of Messiah.
    From a musical point of view Handel could not have chosen a more interesting moment at which to visit Italy. From a political aspect he could scarcely have hit on a worse.