Composer, librettist and playwright, Filippo Acciaiuoli (or Acciaioli) comes from a noble Florentine family; he is the brother of Cardinal Niccolò Acciaiuoli, vice-dean of the Sacro Collegio. Filippo Acciaiuoli is a Knight of Malta, a traveller and a key figure in the planning of performances in Rome, whether in private or public theatres, during the second half of the 17th century. He becomes famous thanks to his machines, which he creates for classical theatre with music; little is known about the mechanisms of these machines today. He also owes his success to his stagecraft innovations and his ability to showcase them—to “sell” them in private theatres of the Roman nobility, as well as in the Tordinona and Capranica theatres. Alongside this activity, he applies his talents as a creator of machines to the puppet theatre, developing large automated figures, presumably controlled from below the stage, and mechanisms to make wooden or wax figurines slide on rails to the centre of the stage. He would manipulate these figurines alone, using a counterbalance system (which may have been developed by Giacomo Torelli or Bartolomeo Neri several years before). In the preface to the libretto for Damira placata, Acciaiuoli declares that art is superior to nature: puppets are the proof of “human genius, capable of bringing life to a piece of wood using silent gestures”.

In Rome, between 1669 to 1682, he stages several plays and writes the libretti himself (according to some sources, he even writes the music); these plays come from a famous repertory, such as Il Novello Giasone, an opera by Cavalli. He also stages original plays such as L’Empio punito (the first opera to tell the story of Dom Juan, found in Tirso de Molina’s play) or Il Girello, which is regarded as the first work of the opéra bouffe genre. Between 1680 and 1682, he has his own plays – Damira placata, Ulisse in Feaccia and Il Girello – performed with puppets in Venice, at the Teatro San Moisè, while singers perform behind the curtain. For the son of Cosimo III de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he builds a puppet theatre with one hundred and twenty-four figurines and twenty-four sceneries, put in motion using a complex counterbalance system: Acciaiuoli’s work connects puppetry techniques for large figures and great theatrical machinery used in operas.