From melologo to melodrama and beyond, or the story of dubious identity

The term "melologo", used sporadically in modern language and treated as an Italian synonym for melodrama, was in its genesis associated with the beginnings of melodramma, although it had a distinct genre and stylistic distinctiveness. The aim of the article is to make this term more precise and to discuss examples of related artistic realizations. The confrontation of the notions of melodrama and melolog in a historical and genological perspective, their etymological and linguistic revision, as well as a comparison of artistic works that represent them allow for the specification of the determinants of the eighteenth-century melodrama and for the identification of specific genre features of the melolog, which - under different names - was practiced throughout the nineteenth century and the twentieth century.