Italian composer. Born in Augusta, Sicily of Spanish nobility, he moved with his family to Palermo in 1693. He first became known through an opera, Dafni, performed in Genoa in 1709; it caught the attention of Charles III, whom the composer apparently followed to Vienna. After a time in Vienna (1712-14) he returned to Italy, married, became a senator of Palermo (1718), and later, in the 1720s, traveled through Sicily, to Lisbon, and possibly also to London. The facts of his later years are uncertain; though documentation is scarce, his life was the subject of highly romanticized accounts by Rochlitz and others. He was also the subject of an opera, Astorga (1866), by Johann Joseph Abert. He is remembered mainly for a Stabat Mater in C that was popular during the nineteenth century; he also composed villançicos, many solo cantatas, and possibly another opera, Zenobia (Vienna, 1712).