Established in Rome in 1781 in order to be close to the "deserving love" of his life, Countess Luisa Stolberg of Albany (cat. n. 30), whom he had met in Florence in 1777, Alfieri went through a serene and industrious period of work. He took house, between October 1781 and May 1783, in the «delightful retreat» of Villa Strozzi near the Baths of Diocletian. He composed the ultimate version in verse of the Antigone (cat. n. 25), which was then played by a group of amateurs belonging to the Roman aristocracy in a private theatre in the Palazzo di Spagna. He himself played the role of Creonte. The play gained the praise of intellectuals such as Alessandro Verri and encouraged the poet to print the tragedies he had composed so far.
The intensity of his studies and reading helped him compose two new tragedies, Merope, where he confronts himself with a theme already handled by Scipione Maffei and Voltaire, and Saul (cat. n. 39) (cat. n. 40) (cat. n. 41). Inspired by the Bible, not as a religious text but as a source of «descriptive, fantastic, and lyric» poetry, Saul is defined by Alfieri as his favorite character as it contains «everything, absolutely everything». Later the role (cat. n. 134) of Saul was often played by Alfieri. Noteworthy were the Saul tragedies played in Florence in 1793 in a private house, in 1794 and 1795 in his home, and again in 1795 at Pisa were he had been invited by Angelo Roncioni (1748-1812) who had founded a theatrical Academy aimed at the «advancement of intellect and morality».
   The Bible suggests a new genre as well, the tramelogedia, which in the poet's point of view was destined to oppose the melodrama, but was soon abandoned after a first unsatisfactory trial.