Do you like a mystery? Then you might be intrigued by this rare little volume. Probably printed in Naples at the end of the eighteenth century, it contains three short libretti which are skillful parodies of another author's works -- those of Pietro Metastasio (1678-1789), a celebrated Italian poet and librettist. The three parodies have kept the original titles of Metastasio's libretti - "L'Artaserse," "Achille in Sciro," and "La Zenobia," - but the contents are very different from Metastasio's classical texts. The author of the parodies masquerades as "Publio Quintiliano Settimio da Sarmacanda" or "da Cambalu`," and the exotic imprints are all false. The imprint for the first libretto is "Pekin, in the present year." The second is for "Hispaham, last year." The third is most likely a reference to Goa, a Portugese colony in India. One of the motives for these carnivalesque parodies may be that after the French Revolution in 1789 and during the Age of Enlightenment, Metastasio's works fell out of favor, for his political views had been unshakably in support of Absolutism and the monarchy.