Carlo Alberto Camillo Mariano Salustri[1] (26 October 1871 – 21 December 1950), known by the pseudonym Trilussa (an anagram of his last name), was an Italian poet, writer and journalist, particularly known for his works in Romanesco dialect.

«S'aricordi de me: non facci sciupo de la salute sua, ch'adesso è bbona, un zaluto a Ccarlotta e un bacio ar pupo.» «Si ricordi di me: non rovini la sua salute, che adesso è buona, un saluto a Carlotta e un bacio al bambino.» "Remember me: do not ruin your health, that now is good, a greeting to Carlotta and a kiss to her son."

(Filippo Chiappini, Ar marchese Riminigirdo Der Cinque[3]) In 1877 Carlotta enrolled her son in the San Nicola municipal schools, where Carlo attended first and second grade.

Then, in October 1880, he took the examination for admission to the Collegio Poli of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, but having made a simple mistake in subtraction, he was forced to repeat the second year.

The sonnet, inspired by Belli, entitled L'invenzione della stampa (The Invention of Printing), begins with Johann Gutenberg's invention and ends with a criticism of contemporary printing in the final tercets: (Romanesco) «Cusì successe, caro patron Rocco, Che quanno annavi ne le libbrerie Te portavi via n' libbro c'un baijocco.

«Così succedeva, caro patron Rocco, che quando andavi nelle librerie acquistavi un libro con cinque centesimi.

Mentre adesso ci sono tanti libri e giornali fatti male che per cinque centesimi dicono moltissime sciocchezze.» "So it used to be, dear patron Rocco, when you went to bookshops you could buy a book for five cents.

From this first publication he began an assiduous collaboration with the Roman periodical, thanks also to the support and encouragement of Edoardo Perino, editor of Rugantino, which would lead the young Trilussa to publish, between 1887 and 1889, fifty poems and forty-one prose works.

Starting with the first stella, published on 3 June 1888, the poems dedicated to Roman women gradually gained such popularity that they involved the entire Rugantino editorial staff.

The popularity of his compositions led Trilussa to select twenty of them and, after revising them and making substantial changes, to publish them in his first collection of poems, Stelle de Roma.

However, his sudden popularity brought with it criticism from Belli's disciples, who attacked him for the themes he dealt with and accused him of using the Romanesco dialect combined with Italian.

It is a revival of the eponymous almanac conceived in 1859 by the Roman poet Adone Finardi, produced in collaboration with Francesco Sabatini, known as Padron Checco, and the illustrator Adriano Minardi, alias Silhouette.

However, Trilussa's most important collaboration came in 1891, when he began writing for the Don Chisciotte della Mancia, a daily newspaper with national circulation, alternating satirical articles targeting Crispi's politics with city chronicles.

[12][13] It was on Luigi Arnaldo Vassallo's newspaper that the fable-writer Trilussa was born, between 1885 and 1899: twelve of the poet's fables appeared in Don Chisciotte; the first among them was La Cecala e la Formica (The Cicada and the Ant), published on 29 November 1895, which, in addition to being the first fable ever written, and the first by Trilussa, is also the first of the so-called Favole Rimodernate (Modernised Tales),[14] which Diego De Miranda, the editor of the column Tra piume e strascichi, in which the fable was published, thus announced: (Diego De Miranda[12]) When De Miranda said that the Roman poet was no longer publishing sonnets because he was studying them, he was probably referring to the collection that Trilussa was preparing, and of which he was aware, which would see daylight only in 1898, printed by Tipografia Folchetto under the title Altri sonetti.

The curious title of the work originated from an episode that biographers consider real:[15][16][17] Trilussa, in financial difficulties, asked Isacco di David Spizzichino, a moneylender, for a loan, guaranteeing to pay him back after the publication of his next book.

[12] In the meantime, the Roman poet began to become declaimer of his own verses, which he recited in cultural circles, theatres, aristocratic salons, and cafè-concerts, Trilussa's favourite places, symbols of the Belle Époque.

However, satire, conducted with a certain political apathy and scepticism, is not the only motif that inspires Trilussian poetry: there are frequent moments of crepuscular melancholy, disconsolate reflection, here and there corrected by flashes of irony, on withering loves, on the loneliness that makes old age bitter and empty (the models in this case are Lorenzo Stecchetti and Guido Gozzano).

Trilussa was the third great dialect Roman poet to appear on the scene from the nineteenth century onwards: while Belli, with his expressive realism, drew fully from the language of the lowest strata and turned it into short, memorable sonnets, Pascarella proposed the language of the United Italy commoner, who typically aspires to culture and middle class, integrated into a narrative of a wider scope.