[4] Born in Santarcangelo di Romagna in 1924,[1][5] Baldini was part of the town's literary-artistic circle, which met in a bar owned by his parents,[1][4] and associated with fellow poets Tonino Guerra and Nino Pedretti [it].
[4] After graduating from the University of Bologna in 1949,[6] he spent some years teaching in local secondary schools,[4][6] before moving to Milan in 1955,[4][6] where he worked as a journalist for Settimo Giorno, Rivista Pirelli,[6] and then Panorama.
[4][1] Baldini's style is described as surreal,[14][15] grotesque,[15][16] or dramatic,[16] exploring the anxieties of the human condition through the monologues of ordinary people.
[1][5] In the immediate postwar period, the young poets from Santarcangelo gathered at the Caffè Trieste, on the Piazza delle Erbe, owned by Baldini's parents.
[1][20] Others in the circle included Tonino Guerra, Nino Pedretti [it], Gianni Fucci [it], Flavio Nicolini [it], Rina Macrelli, and other artists from the neighbouring countryside.
[5] Baldini won the Bagutta Prize with Ad nòta (1995),[21][8] which discussed an elderly couple with insomnia terrorised by knocking at their door.
[22] For Ravenna Teatro, a consortium of the city's theatres, Baldini wrote Furistír (1998),[1] which narrated an agitated search for a building permit that would eventually not be used.
It's exalting to see how much people follow a show that proposes a simple reading of poems from one of the greatest contemporary poets, breaking down the traditional barriers between 'cultivated' and 'popular' poetry.In 2015, an area by the Candiano Canal in Ravenna was named after Baldini.
[11][15] In this sense, according to Gerardo Filiberto Dasi, the poems consider the human condition of "fragile creatures gripped by eternal questions".
[5][15] In a 1996 interview,[9] Baldini said that he wrote in Romagnol because "you can't say everything, but you can say some things better than in Italian",[9][26] capturing the picturesque heritage of regional Italy.
[5] Among Baldini's self-professed influences were Eugenio Montale, Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhass (1810), and Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910).