Martello enjoyed a thorough education in grammar and rhetoric under the Jesuits; later he studied theology and law at the University of Bologna; he also read Greek, Latin and French dramas.

Under the pastoral name of Mirtilo Dianidio, Martello helped to establish the Arcadian "colony" in his native city of Bologna in 1698.

Martello's early literary productions were lyric poems and several librettos: Il Perseo (1697), La Tisbe (1697), L'Apollo geloso (1698), Gli amici (1699).

In his Dialogo della Tragedia antica, e moderna, o sia l'Impostore Martello lashes out at Gravina while examining the differences between tragedy in the early eighteenth century and in ancient Greece.

Martello is known above all for having theorized and then used a dramatic line of fourteen syllables (consisting of two settenari), called Martellian verse.