Giotti's poetry "which is not so much linked to the vernacular tradition as to contemporary poetry in the Italian language, from Pascoli and the Crepuscolari to hermeticism, uses the dialect to give more intimate vibration to its lyrical motifs, now inspired by a loving or familiar, serene or painful intimacy, now by nature, by the landscape, by the minute life of his city; in forms that from the musicality of the canzonetta approach more and more, and with ever greater grace, an epigrammatic essentiality.

[3][2] He was born in Trieste, at the time still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 15 January 1885, the son of Riccardo Schönbeck, a native of Kolín, Bohemia, of German descent,[4] and Emilia Ghiotto, a Venetian, from whose surname he derived his pseudonym.

[2] He also produced his Caprizzi canzonete e stòrie and was reported by his friend Roberto Bazlen to Eugenio Montale, who reviewed his book, emphasizing his qualities of "elegiac landscapist" and observer, and comparing him to Salvatore Di Giacomo.

[2] He was a longtime friend of Umberto Saba, for whom he designed the logo of the Libreria Antica e Moderna and cured and illustrated the plaquette of Cose leggere e vaganti,[2] and helped in the formation of philosopher Giorgio Fano, who married his sister Maria.

Pancrazi, in his Giotti poeta triestino, put him among the great poets of the century, calling his dialectical poetry écriture d'artiste.

In the essay Poesia di Giotti published by Mario Fubini [it] on Il ponte in November 1948, he was acknowledged as the greatest among the poets writing in dialect.

Unlike Svevo and Saba, Giotti's Trieste is not the Habsburg port of Central Europe but rather a simple picture of affections and people: its "Triestinity", alien to the search for the picturesque and folkloric, lies in the use of the dialect and in the setting, background for poetry of high lyrical tension.