The Italian composer Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) is best known for his operas, of which he wrote 39 between 1806 and 1829. Adopting the opera buffa style of Domenico Cimarosa and Giovanni Paisiello, Rossini became the dominant composer of Italian opera during the first half of the 19th-century. Though working at the same time as Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti, he was recognized by his contemporaries as the greatest Italian composer of his time, an evaluation which has lasted into the 21st-century.