Gianni Cicali (Florence, Italy) received his Italian Ph.D. in History of Theater at the University of Florence-Dept. of Arts, Music and Theater in 2004. After one year he moved to Canada where he joined the University of Toronto, Ph.D program in Italian Studies. He completed his second Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in December 2008, with a dissertation on the Legend of the Discovery of the True Cross in Renaissance theater and its relations with the birth of a modern anti-semitism and the Medici's political agenda from the late fifteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century.
He has published a book on eighteenth-century Italian comic opera (Attori e ruoli nell'opera buffa italiana), and several articles on the most important journals in the field (Il Castello di Elsinore; Drammaturgia; Problemi di Critica Goldoniana; Annali del Dipartimento di Arte e Spettacolo dell'Universita' di Firenze; Quaderni di Italianistica). His articles are devoted mainly to Renaissance and eighteenth-century Italian theater. He regularly reviews books, operas, theater productions. He co-founded an academic e-journal, www.drammaturgia.it.
His interests focus on religious and music theater, on Commedia dell'Arte, on relations between theater and arts, and theater and cinema, on the eighteenth-century Neapolitan history of theater, on the history of Italian actors.