Giuseppe Giacosa

Giuseppe Giacosa left the law when his verse comedy Una partita a scacchi succeeded. His later plays moved from romantic medievalism to bourgeois realism, Tristi amori and Come le foglie most admired. Ricordi paired him with Luigi Illica in 1894, both having worked on the unattributed Manon Lescaut; they wrote three more for Puccini: La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. Illica built the drama and Giacosa versified it, an arrangement he found wearing and repeatedly tried to leave, though his calm there earned him the nickname "the Buddha". From 1901 he edited La lettura, the Corriere della Sera's monthly.