Born to a well-to-do family, nothing is known of Cortese's early life, though it is thought that he was a schoolmate of Giambattista Basile.
In his "Tuscan" rhymes there is a fruitless attempt to catch the attention of the Counts of Lemos, the foremost representatives of the Spanish crown in Naples.
A mock-heroic poem in five cantos, where the lyric meter and the heroic themes are lowered to the level of the protagonists: a group of vaiasse, common Neapolitan women who express themselves in dialect.
This work, written in dialect, serves as a diagnostic exploration of the state of literature and the individuals involved in it, with a variety of autobiographical allusions, filled with bitterness and pessimism.
The entire narrative takes place in Parnassus where Apollo and his Muses reside and where the poet can set forth the sins of poetry, carried out in a degraded society, where the order of the day is the crime of plagiarism.