Giovanni da Palestrina (1525?-1594) was perhaps the first famous Italian composer, working in Rome (near his birthplace) and helping to develop a distinctive style of counterpoint in a city-state that was dominated by northern European styles inherited from Josquin des Prez and Guillaume Dufay. His music was largely religious in nature.

It is a misconception (largely spread by Hans Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina) that Palestrina defied a ban by the Catholic Church on polyphony, thus making all of subsequent Western music history possible. In fact, the Church never definitively ruled on whether polyphony was permissible in music.