[citation needed] Literature in Western Lombard had its first flowering with the Milanese Pietro da Barsegapè and the Cremonese Girard Pateg in the 13th century.
Almost contemporaneous with them was Uguccione da Lodi, author of the so-called Libro, a poem of 702 verses on the creation of the world, the pains of hell, and a range of moral issues.
In the late fifteenth century Western Lombard literature begins to take shape, with poets like Andrea Marone (1474-1527) and Lancino Curti (1460-1512).
One of the most interesting Western Lombard works of the Renaissance is the collection of poems Rabisch (“Arabesque") published in 1589 by the Milanese painter and literary theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo.
Written in an invented language modeled on the rural dialects of the Lombard valleys, the collection is characterised by an eccentric narrative including exotic animals, grotesque figures and fantastic creatures.
More realistic portrayals of the plebeian condition found their way into the Canzoni composed by the poète maudit Fabio Varese (c. 1570-1630) in the early seventeenth century; they were published only recently, after a long period of a moralistically motivated emargination.
They also construct the long-lasting archetypal Milanese character, Meneghino, the long-suffering, sensible, no-nonsense plebeian servant, and create an image of the ‘verzee’, the main vegetable market in Milan, which is portrayed in the Barone di Birbanza as the place where the most truthful and spontaneous expression of the culture of the Milanese populace is to be found.
The eighteenth century is rich in satirical poetry, with Domenico Balestrieri and Carlo Antonio Tanzi (1710-1762) as its major figures.
Milanese dialect poetry flourished in the early 19th century with such authors as Carlo Porta and Tommaso Grossi.
More specifically, recent scholarship claims a strong linguistic and poetic influence of Porta's poetry on Manzoni's The Betrothed.