ABSTRACT
In the case of seventeenth-century Rome, the environment in which Alessandro Scarlatti's work is based, we may be rather astonished at the high percentage accuracy of professional copying, given the volume of work undertaken, clearly at speed. The highly organized and documented work environment of professional Roman music copying is in apparent contrast to the Neapolitan situation, which must nevertheless have loomed large in Scarlatti's working life. The late seventeenth-century Neapolitan copyists have not so far received a comparable study available in English, although in Italian the unpublished doctoral dissertation of Mauro Amato is an outstanding contribution. Despite the difficulty of relating its copyist to a particular place or time, the presence of a watermark – the animal in single circle – characteristic of Neapolitan paper gives at least some likelihood of its being of Neapolitan origins.
