Caroso Marco Fabrizio, *ca. 1527 Sermoneta (Latina), †after 1605, Italian choreographer, dance theorist and composer. He spent most of his life in Rome, teaching dance. His work Il ballarino (Venice 1581, F. Ziletti; expanded edition titled Nobiltà di dame, Venice 1605) is one of the most important sources on the history of dance in the 16th century; it contains rules for performing contemporary dances, including descriptions of dance steps and illustrations, ballet choreographies, and lute tablature. Caroso’s dance steps and compositions showed strong Spanish influences; he mentioned, among others, pavans and cascades.
Literature: La danza italiana tra Cinque e Seicento. Studi per F. Caroso da Sermoneta, ed. P. Gargiulo, Rome 1997.
Works:
Nobiltà di dame…, Venice 1600, 2nd edition 1605, revised edition entitled Raccolta di varij balli…, Rome 1630
Editions:
Il ballarino, facsimile edition, New York 1967, «Monuments of Music and Music Literature in Facsimile» 11/46
Danze del secolo XVI transcritte in notazione moderna dalle opere „Nobiltà di Dame” del Sig. F. Catroso da Sermoneta e “Le Grazie d’Amore” di C. Negri Milanese detto il Tromboncino, ed. O. Chilesotti, «Biblioteca di Rarità Musicali» I, Milan 1883, reprint Bologna 1968
Nobiltà di dame (1600), a Treatise on Courtly Dance, English translation by J. Sutton and F.M. Walker, Oxford 1986, 2nd edition, New York 1995
