Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli

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Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (September 7, 1791 - December 21, 1863) was an Italian poet, famous for his sonnets in Romanesco, the dialect of Rome.

[edit] Biography

Giuseppe Gioachino Belli was born in Rome to a family of the little bourgeoisie.

His father had moved to Civitavecchia, where he was killed by cholera. Belli, with his mother and his two brothers, moved back to Rome, living in a poor house in Via del Corso. Belli began his poetical career initially in Italian, through the incitement of his friend, the poet Francesco Spada.

After a period of literary employment in poor circumstances, in 1816 his marriage with a woman of means, Maria Conti, enabled him to follow his special vein of literature. The two had a son, Ciro, born in 1824. Belli made some trips to Northern and Central Italy, where he could come in contact with a more evolved literary world, as well with the Enlightenment and revolutionary milieu which was almost totally absent in his native city. Despite the satirical and often anti-clerical views showed by the sonnets, he had defined the Cardinals as "dog-robbers", for example, while Pope Gregory XVI kept "Rome as his inn room", Belli's political ideas remained largely conservative throughout his life. During the democratic rebellion of the Roman Republic of 1849 he defended the rights of the pope.

After the death of his wife in 1837, his economic situation worsened again. In his late years Belli lost much of his vitality, growing an increasing degree of acrimony against the world around him, and variously describing himself as "a dead poet". Consequently, his poetical production became sparser, his last sonnet dating from 1849.

In his later years Belli worked as artistical and political censor for the papal government. Works of which he denied circulation included those of William Shakespeare, Giuseppe Verdi and Gioacchino Rossini.

He died in Rome in 1863 from a stroke.

[edit] Work

Belli is mainly remembered for his vivid popular poetry in the Roman dialect. He produced more than 2,000 sonnets that form an invaluable document of 19th century's papal Rome and the life of its common, humbler people. They were mainly composed in the period 1830-1839. Belli kept them largely hidden, and, just before his death, asked his friend Monsignor Vincenzo Tizzani to burn them. Fortunately, the prelate gave them back to Ciro Belli, who first publishing a selection of them in 1866.

The most striking characteristics of Belli's sonnets are the overwhelming humour and the sharp, relentless capability of satirization of common life. Some of the sonnets, moreover, show a particular degree of eroticism. Although full of accuses and denounciations against the corruption of the world of the Roman Church, and of the 19th century Rome in general, Belli's poems has been defined "never unpious". Even his most direct verses do not overcame the boundary of obscenity, favoured by a noteworthy technical mastery and by a sense of realism which was rarely matched in the poetical production of Europe.

[edit] External links

• Virtual Rome describes in detail the "Romanesco" dialect employed by Belli.
• Tutti i sonetti romaneschi and other works by Belli: text, concordances and frequency list