Giovanni Cosimo Villifranchi

Giovanni Cosimo Villifranchi (Volterra, 1646 – Florence, 12 March 1699) was an Italian librettist whose work belongs to late seventeenth-century Florence. His importance rests above all on opera buffa, a field in which he was, according to some accounts, the most prolific and inventive Italian librettist of the second half of the seventeenth century.

His first dramatic work, Amore e politica (1677), survives only in manuscript and may be regarded as a forerunner of the melodramma. His first published libretto, Amore è veleno e medicina degl'intelletti (Bologna, 1679), was a verse version of G. B. Ricciardi's comedy Il Trespolo tutore. It was intended to counter a plagiarised version that Bernardo Pasquini had set to music and staged in Rome in 1677. Stradella composed a score for the authentic version, performed in Genoa in 1678 or 1679.

In Florence he wrote most of the comic libretti for the Villa di Pratolino of Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, whom he also served as personal physician. He wrote only one opera seria, Filippo Macedone, which is now lost.

His reputation has been overshadowed by the fact that barely any scores of his works survive.