He served as secretary to Duke Luigi Braschi Onesti, enjoyed favour at the court of the enlightened and judicious Pope Pius VI, the uncle of his patron, and soon gained a leading position in Roman literary circles.

In the former, which is in terza rima, the beauties of Nature from the time of the Creation are depicted, in a sequence of magnificent images; the latter was written to mark the first ascent of the brothers Charles and Robert Montgolfier in their hydrogen balloon, which took off in the Tuileries on 1 December 1783.

The Ode al signor di Montgolfier, which was composed in the form of a canzonetta with lines of seven syllables arranged in four-line stanzas, was recited in Arcadia in 1784, the year of its composition.

In the same year Monti began one of his most distinguished poems, La Feroniade, a mythological composition of Virgilian inspiration in which he extolled the plans of Pius VI for the drainage and reclamation of the Pontine Marshes.

An unhappy love-affair at this time provided inspiration for Al Principe Don Sigismondo Chigi and Pensieri d'amore (1783) – the latter, with its perhaps too faithful rendering of passages from Goethe's Werther, being unique among all his poetry for its emotional content.

[3] Encouraged by this success, Monti undertook a new tragedy in the Alfieri manner, this time with a subject drawn from fifteenth-century Italian history, Galeotto Manfredi.

The subject of the Bassvilliana, four cantos in terza rima, was provided by a political assassination: on 13 January 1793 Nicolas Jean Hugou de Basseville, who had been sent to Naples as secretary to the French Legation to sustain the Republican cause, was stabbed to death by a mob stirred up against him by the reactionaries.

At this time Monti deplored the excesses of the Revolution and the violence of the Jacobins, and in the poem he turned the interest away from the protagonist to the unfortunate Louis XVI, who is presented as an innocent victim of the Revolutionaries.

In 1797 Monti left Rome and, after visiting Bologna and Venice, finally settled in Milan, forsaking his former opposition to the French Revolution (expressed in the Bassvilliana)[5] and becoming a supporter of the newborn Cisalpine Republic.

He adopted a conservative standpoint and in his last poem, the Sermone sulla mitologia (1825), he roundly condemned Romantic aesthetics and defended the rights of the new literature to use mythological imaterial, as he himself was doing in Le nozze di Cadmo e d'Ermione (1825).