Assedio di Corinto

Le siège de Corinthe (The Siege of Corinth) is an opera in three acts by Gioachino Rossini to a French libretto by Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet, based on Maometto II by Cesare della Valle. It was Rossini's first French opera, known also in its Italian version as L'assedio di Corinto.
The opera commemorates the siege and ultimate destruction of the town of Missolonghi in 1826 by Turkish during the ongoing Greek War of Independence (1821-1829). The reference to Corinth is an example of allegory, although Sultan Mehmed II had indeed besieged the city in the 1450s. This same incident - condemned throughout Western Europe for its cruelty - also inspired a prominent painting by Eugène Delacroix (Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi), and was mentioned in the writings of Victor Hugo. Lord Byron's 1816 poem The Siege of Corinth has little, if any, connection with the opera.