Giuseppe Gioachino
Belli
This site is devoted to the vernacular romanesco sonnets of Belli, one of Italy's greatest poets, 50 of the 429 translated by Michael Sullivan.
Note: Throughout the site, numbers in square brackets refer to Tutti i sonetti romanschi, ed. Marcello Teodonio, Newton & Compton, Rome 2005.
1791
Giuseppe Gioachino Belli was born on in Rome on 7 September 1791, three years after the French Revolution, and died in 1863, just a few years before the Unification of Italy. Thus he lived his life, except for the brief interlude (February to June) of the Roman Republic of 1849, under a papal rule as absolutist as the Bourbons or Napoleon.
1802
The family, initially well-to-do, fell into poverty on the death of his father in 1802, and when his mother died in 1807 he and his brother and sister were entrusted to an uncle and aunt who mistreated and humiliated them.
At school with the Jesuits in Rome, where he began to compose poetry, he studied literature and the sciences, interests he was to retain throughout his life.
1807
Given his home situation, Belli had to abandoned regular studies in 1807 though he continued to read widely and write poetry, at this period and at various times to come in the standard Italian of his day, and was sometime employed as an accounts clerk, work he was to return to later in times of need. These were years of grinding poverty and mishaps during which he survived by coaching in Italian, Geography, and Maths, and, dullest of all, by working as a scrivener.
1814
In 1814, as he was becoming known in literary circles, he met Maria Conti, daughter of a family of rich lawyers, at that time married to Count Giulio Picchi.
1816
Two years later, some months after Picchi’s death, Belli married Maria. They went to live in a vast apartment near the Trevi fountain, 16 rooms, two live-in maids, three footmen in livery. This year, 1816, saw the publication of Belli’s first long poem in Italian. He also published three stage pieces in a series edited by the poet and librettist Giacomo Ferretti, in whose drawing room he met writers, painters, singers and composers, among them Donizetti and later Verdi.
1820
Sometime in the two years up to 1820 Belli wrote a sonnet in romanesco, the dialect of the common people of Rome which was to become his great medium.
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In 1820 he began to travel, though never leaving Italy. For the next twenty-five years he passed much time out of Rome, particularly in the Marche and in Umbria.
1824
In April 1824 Maria Belli gave birth to their only male child, Ciro. Much loved and cared for by Belli (one of the purposed of the Zibaldone, an encyclopaedia of extracts from and annotations on Belli’s reading - history, archaeology, the natural sciences, art, literature, anthropology - was as aid to Ciro’s education. Ciro was among the editors of bowdlerised versions of 197 of Belli’s sonnets published in 1865-66.
1826
Given retirement from an accounting job in 1826, with a pension equal to his pay, for the next fifteen years Belli was at ease to pursue his predilections: poetry, study, travel.
1827
For the first time in 1827 Belli went as far as Milan, a city he much appreciated for its difference from Rome, not least in the relations between governed and governors. It was there that he encountered the vernacular poetry of Carlo Porta, of great importance in shaping his subsequent decision to use the Roman dialect for the representation of reality. It would become flexible enough in his hands to encompass everything: God, superstition, sex, everyday life, corrupt rulers, the common people, speaking not in their name but in their own various voice.
1827-1829
Over the next couple of years Belli wrote a handful of sonnets in romanesco, and it was with perhaps the tenth, entitled Pio VIII, of April 1st 1829, that his “human comedy” began, according to Giogio Vigolo, his first great editor.
1831
In 1831 his ideas had clarified sufficiently for him to write the first draft of an Introduction, worked on several times later and never signed off, to a book he must several times have considered publishing but never did. The work had the provisional title 996, a cryptogram of ggb, the initial letters of the name Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. His opening declaration in the Introduction is unequivocal: “I have decided to leave a monument to what the plebs of Rome is today”.
1831-1835
Between September 1831 and December 1835 Belli wrote almost 1,700 of his 2,279 sonetti romaneschi.
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1834
He returned to writing also in Italian in 1834, publishing various sonnets on famous actors and singers.
1835
At a lunch party given by Princess Zenaida Volkonsky he recited a romanesco sonnet . In was in her salon that Gogol met and heard Belli. The romanesco sonnet The father and the daughter [1677], the only one published in his lifetime with Belli’s permission, appeared in a Milanese magazine.
1837
Belli’s wife Maria died in 1837. Her affairs were embroiled, and for years to come Belli found himself in dire straits. Rome was stricken by a cholera epidemic that killed more than 10,000 out of a population of about 150,000. Over the next six years Belli added very few sonnets to the “monument”. In this year he made a will in which is mentioned “a box full of my manuscripts in verse. They must be burned”.
1838
This disenchantment is repeated in a letter of 1838: “There are two thousand, but to be kept hidden and then someday burned perhaps”.
1839
In 1839 his first volume of poem in Italian was published thanks to friends. He began to suffer from permanent headache.
1840
In 1840 Sainte-Beuve wrote: “Extraordinary! A great poet in Rome, an original poet... Gogol knows him and has spoken to me in depth about him. He writes sonnets in the trastevere dialect, but the sonnets are linked and form a poem...”.
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1841
Belli’s son, Ciro, returns to Rome from boarding school in 1841 and enrols to study Law at the University.
1843
In 1843 Belli returned to writing sonnets in romanesco. Over 280 were to follow.
1844
His friends saw to the publication in 1844 of a second volume of poems in Italian. The headaches continued.
1845
In 1845 Ciro graduated with a degree in Jurisprudence. A romanesco sonnet, written in in December, La vita da cane [2121], “A dogs life” , circulated anonymous and in manuscript throughout Europe. Mazzini in London made mentions of it.
1846
For some months in 1846 Ciro was dangerously ill. Belli nursed him day and night.
1847
In 1847 Belli wrote his penultimate sonnet in romanesco [2278]. His reason for abandoning the “monument” is not clear to his biographers. The poem excoriates a howling songstress, but the closing tercet runs: “So wan that wispy voice comes out, so wan//that if yer open yer mouth in Jew Square//they go plug their ears at St John Lateran”. A voice, dim and small enough, but ironically crossing the city from the poorest, most beset, quarter to the titular church of the pope/sovereign, where it goes unheard.
1849
In 1849 an end was declared to the temporal power of the popes and the new-founded Roman Republic organised a civic guard. Distraught, Belli saw to the wedding of his son Ciro to Cristina, daughter of his great friend Giacomo Ferretti, since married men were excluded from service.
The French occupation of Rome in June 1849 put an end to the Roman Republic and restored the papacy. Belli addressed his last sonnet in romanesco, occasional verses pleading he is too ill to attend lunch, to his beloved daughter-in-law Cristina. Later in the year he moved to share a home with her and Ciro.
1851
He began writing again concentratedly in 1851, satire now in Italian.
1852
In 1852 Giacomo Ferretti died. Belli was appointed theatre censor. It was broadly his view that it was better to prohibit performance than grossly interfere with known texts, though he did object to works by Rossini and his own friend Verdi, and to the violence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
1853
His beloved grandson, named after him, died in 1853. He published a vernacular version of the Litanies of the Blessed Virgin and began on such a treatment of the Ecclesiatical hymns in the Roman Breviary.
1855
In 1855, in reply to a pirated and bungled version of La poverella [449] he claimed: “That apart, if I ever compose any bagatelle of the kind, I did do for my own amusement and not for the press”.
1856
The Ecclesiastical Hymns in romanesco was published in 1856 and Belli “humiliated” a copy to Pope Pius IX, who “deigned” to bestow a gold medal on him.
1858
In 1858 Belli wrote his last Italian sonnet.
1859
After Cristina died in 1859 Belli spent his closing years with an ever more silent Ciro looking after his grandchildren.
1861
In refusing an offer made to him in 1561 to translate the Gospels into romanesco, Belli explained that the reason he had written in dialect was “to lead our common people to speak of themselves in their own raw, rough and even bawdy tongue”.
1863
Belli suffered a stroke on the evening of 21 December 1863 while supervising his grandchildren's homework. He died a few hours later.