Google Celebrates Leap Day and Gioachino Rossini with Doodle
Google Inc. celebrated the leap year and composer Gioachino Rossini's 220th birthday Wednesday with a two-for-one Google Doodle. The Doodle features frogs performing Rossini's opera "The Barber of Seville".
The frog connection is Google's trademark for marking leap years, where February gets an extra day every four years to mark the actual time it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun. Google regularly calls on its "leap frogs" to celebrate the 29th of February. The frogs first hopped on Google's home page in 2004 and again in 2008.
Rossini was born Feb. 29, 1792 in Pesaro, Italy. He is famous for writing such operas as "The Barber of Seville" and "William Tell". He was a prodigious composer and wrote 39 operas as well as chamber and sacred music. Rossini died in 1868 in Paris and was buried in France's Pere Lachaise cemetery before his remains were moved to Florence two decades later.
The combo Google Doodle features a scene from Rossini's "The Barber of Seville". In the scene, Count Almaviva masquerades as a music teacher to court the woman he's in love with. The woman's name is Rosina, but she is the ward of Bartolo, who plans to marry her instead and keep her away from Almaviva. Figaro, the barber of Seville, attempts to help the two lovers by distracting Bartolo so that Almaviva and Rosina can declare their love.
Google's double Doodle is by Google Doodle team leader Ryan Germick, who worked on two of Google's more popular doodles: the Les Paul interactive doodle and Pac-Man.