The miniature vignettes of the Italian Songbook constitute Wolf"s last major contribution to the Lied, before his early death. After the high-minded philosophical sobriety of Goethe and the weighty devoutness of the geistliche Lieder in the Spanish Songbook, Wolf must have found the lusty, direct gioia di vivere of the Italian poems a great breath of fresh air. He had a particular affection for them, to judge from his assertion in an 1891 letter that "my Italian songs are the most original and artistically the most perfect of all my things."