Errico Petrella, was a Sicilian-Neapolitan composer, a contemporary of Verdi and Wagner and a maverick student of the Neapolitan school. Jone was composed for the 1857 carnival-Lent season of La Fenice in Venice, but was included instead in the 1857-58 season at La Scala and it made its debut in Milan’s leading opera house on January 26, 1858. The libretto, based on the historical novel, The Last Days of Pompei, by Bulwer-Lytton, is set in Pompei in 79 ad and was put into fairly elegant verse by the Venetian poet and patriot Giovanni Peruzzini. It tells the story of two young Greeks, Glauco and Jone, whose love is obstructed by the plotting of Arbace, the high priest of Isis. The plot mirrored the preferences of the day and was a percursor to the pro-oriental and pseudo-archeological trend that would characterize so much of European opera in the second half of the century.