Giuseppe Francesco Antonio Maria Gioachino Raimondo Belli (7 September 1791 – 21 December 1863) was an Italian poet, famous for hissonnets inRomanesco, thedialect ofRome.
Giuseppe Francesco Antonio Maria Gioachino Raimondo Belli was born inRome, Italy, to a family belonging to the lowerbourgeoisie.
His father died oftyphus, some time after taking up a job inCivitavecchia.[1] Belli, with his mother and his two brothers, moved back to Rome, where they were forced to take cheap lodgings inVia del Corso. Belli began his poetical career initially by composing sonnets inItalian, at the suggestion of his friend, the poetFrancesco Spada.
After a period of employment in straitened circumstances, in 1816 he married a woman of means, Maria Conti, and this enabled him the ease to develop his literary talents. The two had a son, Ciro, born in 1824. Belli made some trips toNorthern andCentral Italy, where he could come in contact with a more evolved literary world, as well with theEnlightenment and revolutionary milieu which was almost totally absent in Rome, where a strong social cohesion had made the almost anarchoid population completely independent from and indifferent to political ideologies. It was during a stay inMilan that he came in touch with the rich local tradition of dialect poetry and satire, as modernized byCarlo Porta, whose witty vernacular sonnets provided him with a model for the poems in Roman dialect that were to make him, posthumously, famous.
His sonnets were oftensatirical and anti-clerical, as when he defined the Cardinals as 'dog-robbers', for example, orPope Gregory XVI as someone who kept 'Rome as his personal inn'. Nevertheless, Belli's political ideas remained largely conservative throughout his life. During the democratic rebellion of theRoman Republic of 1849 he defended the rights of thepope.
After his wife's death in 1837, Belli's economic situation worsened again. In later years Belli lost much of his vitality, and he felt a growing acrimony against the world around him, describing himself as "a dead poet". Consequently, his poetical production dropped off and his last sonnet in dialect dates to 1849.
In his later years Belli worked as artistical and politicalcensor for the papal government. Works whose circulation he denied included those ofWilliam Shakespeare,Giuseppe Verdi andGioachino Rossini.
He died in Rome in 1863 from astroke. His nephew, painterGuglielmo Janni, wrote a monumental biography in 10 volumes, which was published posthumously in 1967.
Belli is mainly remembered for his vivid popularpoetry in the Romandialect.[2] He produced some 2,279 sonnets that form an invaluable document of the 19th century'spapal Rome and the life of its common people. They were mainly composed in the period 1830–1839. Belli kept them largely hidden, apart from his famous recitals before friends such asCharles Augustin Sainte-Beuve andNikolai Gogol and, just before his death, asked his friend Monsignor Vincenzo Tizzani to burn them. Fortunately, theprelate gave them back to Ciro Belli, who when first publishing a selection of them in 1866, severely edited them in order not to offend the taste of the time.
Belli came to Roman from Italian, as an educated and intelligent user of the language, and his Letters, recently published, represent some of the finest Italian style of the period. He regarded his Roman sonnets in something of the light of an anthropologist, expressing what he saw of the mood, experience and opinions of the Roman lower classes, and his felicity with the Roman language depended on an already acquired felicity with Italian that was very rare in his time.
The most striking characteristics of Belli's sonnets are the overwhelming humour and the sharp, relentless capability of satirization of both common life and the clerical world that oppressed it. Some of the sonnets, moreover, show a decided degree oferoticism. Although replete with denunciations of the corruption of the world of the Roman Church, and of 19th century Rome in general, Belli's poems have been defined as "never impious". His verse is frequently obscene, emphasizing the exuberant vulgarity and acerbic intuitions of the local world whose language he employed, but is always phrased with an acute technical mastery of rhythm within the difficult formal structures of the Petrarchan sonnet, and by a sense ofrealism which was rarely matched in the poetical production of Europe, until the emergence of raw realism withÉmile Zola andJames Joyce.
A selection of Belli's sonnets were translated into English byAnthony Burgess, who employed a rough slang tinged with Lancastrian as a stand-in for Belli's Roman dialect. These translations appear in the novelABBA ABBA, which deals with a fictional encounter between Belli andJohn Keats, and are excerpted inRevolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems. Belli's works have also been translated by the poetHarold Norse.
Among other English translators of Belli's work areWilliam Carlos Williams,Eleanor Clark andMiller Williams.Robert Garioch has rendered a selection of his sonnets, very appropriately, into Edinburgh demotic.[3]
InLuigi Magni's filmIn the Name of the Sovereign People (1990), Belli is played byRoberto Herlitzka.
