Giuseppe Gioachino Belli

Giuseppe Francesco Antonio Maria Gioachino Raimondo Belli (7 September 1791 – 21 December 1863) was an Italian poet, famous for his sonnets in Romanesco, the dialect of Rome.

Giuseppe Francesco Antonio Maria Gioachino Raimondo Belli was born in Rome, Italy, to a family belonging to the lower bourgeoisie.

Belli began his poetical career initially by composing sonnets in Italian, at the suggestion of his friend, the poet Francesco Spada.

After a period of employment in straitened circumstances, in 1816 he married a woman of means, Maria Conti, and this enabled him the ease to develop his literary talents.

Fortunately, the prelate gave them back to Ciro Belli, who when first publishing a selection of them in 1866, severely edited them in order not to offend the taste of the time.

The most striking characteristics of Belli's sonnets are the overwhelming humour and the sharp, relentless capability of satirization of both common life and the clerical world that oppressed it.

His verse is frequently obscene, emphasizing the exuberant vulgarity and acerbic intuitions of the local world whose language he employed, but is always phrased with an acute technical mastery of rhythm within the difficult formal structures of the Petrarchan sonnet, and by a sense of realism which was rarely matched in the poetical production of Europe, until the emergence of raw realism with Émile Zola and James Joyce.