Giovanni Ferretti was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, best known for his secular music. He was important in the development of the lighter kind of madrigal current in the 1570s related to the villanella, and was influential as far away as England. Ferretti's music epitomizes the lightness of texture and subject matter which was one of the several diverging trends in secular vocal music composition in Italy in the last half of the 16th century. While few of his compositions were titled "madrigal", they may be seen as part of the broad continuum of secular music of which madrigals were a part. Most of his works were canzoni alla napolitana, canzonas in the Neapolitan style, a light form of villanella (with a rhyme scheme of a a b c c, but with the individual lines elaborated in the manner of the madrigal). While composers had been writing villanelle for a long time, Ferretti was the first to bring madrigalian characteristics to the form.