d'India was probably born in
Palermo,
Sicily in 1582, though details of his life are lacking until around 1600. During the first decade of the 17th century he probably traveled widely in Italy, meeting composers, acquiring patrons at various aristocratic courts, and absorbing the musical styles at each locale. This was a time of transition in music history, as the
polyphonic style of the late Renaissance was giving way to the widely diverse practices of the early Baroque, and d'India seems to have acquired an unusually broad grasp of the total stylistic practice in Italy: the expressive
madrigal style of
Marenzio, the grand
polychoral work of the
Venetian School, the conservative polyphonic tradition of the
Roman School, the attempts to recover the music of the ancient world in
monody and its larger vehicle, the newly developing
opera, as well as the mannered, emotionally intense chromatic style of
Carlo Gesualdo in
Naples. d'India is known to have been in
Florence, the birthplace of opera, as well as
Mantua, where Monteverdi was working. In Naples he probably met Gesualdo, and by 1610 he was in
Parma and
Piacenza. The next year, 1611, he was hired by
Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, to direct music in
Turin, where he remained until 1623; these were the most productive years of his life, during which he amalgamated the disparate types of music he had heard and absorbed during the years 1600–1610 into a unified style. After leaving Turin – apparently forced out by malicious gossip – he traveled around Italy for five months before settling for a time at the D'Este court in
Modena (October 1623 to April 1624), and then moved to
Rome; he seems to have died in Modena, although details on the end of his life are as sparse as they were for its beginning. A record exists of his being granted an appointment in
Bavaria at the court of
Maximilian I, although there is no evidence he went there; he may have died first. ==Works==