My PhD project offers a new perspective on the life and work of Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654), who is considered to be the most important playwright of seventeenth-century Italy. He followed in the footsteps of his famous parents, Francesco Andreini (1548-1624) and the diva Isabella Andreini (1562-1604), as actor and playwright. His complex literary and social network deserves further investigation: it involved musicians, men of letters, academicians and nobles. A conjunction of favorable creative circumstances, as the co-occurrent development of the first operatic forms, influenced the form of his plays, which usually contain musical parts. His copious hybrid production was also influential throughout Europe. These are just some of the lines of research that Andreini’s eclectic career produces, allowing intertextual and interdisciplinary reflections