He is primarily known as the librettist of Gaetano Donizetti's operas Gemma di Vergy and Marino Faliero, but he also wrote many other librettos for lesser known composers as well as plays, essays, books about Naples, and a treatise on acting.

Giovanni Emanuele did not share his father's conservative views and support for the Bourbon rulers of Sicily and Naples which caused considerable friction between them.

[5][1] During his various peregrinations with the theatre troupe, which also included multiple sojourns in Naples, he met Giacoma Schultz, a Sicilan woman of Swiss origin.

Bidera and his young family settled in Naples in the late 1820s where he published a treatise on acting and found a congenial atmosphere in a musical circle called I Trascendentali.

After his work at the Teatro San Carlo, he produced the librettos for a number of other operas by now-forgotten composers, but which had performances in Naples, Milan, and Venice.

He opened an acting school there and devoted himself to research in philosophy and linguistics, writing occasional pieces for the Sicilian journals L'Armonia and Il Poligrafo.

[5][1] The book began with a four-line autobiographical poem: I lived a time of pleasure more than pain; I was a dramatic actor and then a writer; Amidst ancient memories, I now partake in Old age, I think, I take walks and I smoke.

[5][1] Shortly after his death, the composer and writer Marco Marcelliano Marcello wrote in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano: I will not see him again, that good old man, with a spent cigar stub between his teeth, poor but happy; friend of the young, as I had been in Naples.

Pietro Atanasio initially worked as a tax officer for the government of Ferdinand II, but was dismissed from that post around the time his father was exiled from Naples.

After that he devoted himself to republishing his father's works and later founded and ran La Pubblicità Universale, a commercial newspaper published in five languages with an associated advertising agency.