In any case it is worth pausing to examine Talestri for a moment. The copy of the libretto we were able to consult, held at the Taylor Library in Oxford, is bound together with French librettos of pastorals, ballets and tragedies (operas), as well as with two English librettos (one of them Handel’s Messiah), and belonged to the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family. This dramma per musica, as was frequently the case in the Arcadian circle, contained very few characters (there are only five vocalists with arias), the one story line, lacked comic elements and kept to the Metastasian procedure of placing the arias at the end of scenes. However, instead of taking place in an Arcadian setting, most of the plot is set in the palace salons and the ruinous dungeons of the Amazons, resembling scenes that were very common in 19th-century opera. Nevertheless, the work contains some very notable features. The Queen (Talestri), her only antagonist (Tomiri) and her confident (Antiope) are all women. The male lead (Oronte) has to disguise himself as a female warrior (Orizia) to win Talestri’s love (as a woman), thus reversing the role played by female warriors in Italian theatre since Torcuato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. This is not, however, seen on stage, since the opera begins after Oronte’s return as a man to implore Talestri’s love, to the point of pleading with her using the typical lasciami morire normally assigned to women in desperate cases of the heart. In other words, the opera inverts the traditional designation of masculine and feminine roles in Italian opera seria.

In sum, Walpurgis’s Talestri, Regina delle amazoni and Eximeno’s critique all questioned the hegemonic thought of their time regarding the genre, which would culminate in the Kantian exclusion of women as ethical, and ultimately political, subjects.