Writing clandestine sonnets in local dialect for over fifteen years whilst leading a respectably conformist life of letters and bureaucracy, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli erected a lasting poetical monument to the people of nineteenth-century Rome.
Set against the chequered background of the city of the six Ps - Pope, priests, princes, prostitutes, parasites and the poor - Belli's sometimes scandalous sonnets deal with life's elementals: love, death, sex, food, money, family, religion and politics. In his immense oeuvre, sampled here in a sizeable and varied selection of the best poems, people from every course and manner of life have their say - housewives, mothers, beggars, lovers, businessmen, popes, whores, doctors, thieves, lawyers, priests, pen-pushers, actresses, gossips and many more. Their voices and preoccupations are brilliantly and accurately rendered in this volume by Mike Stocks, one of the finest sonneteers of our day.
'The naturalistic intensity of the originals is rendered in a vibrant streetwise slang ... which pungently revivifies the drama of Belli's Rome.
Times Literary Supplement
'Belli was the great master of the dialect and a scholarly recorder of the filth and blasphemy.'
Anthony Burgess
'If we think of Belli as the contemporary of the first Romantic generation and the first naturalists, we can assess what an extraordinary phenomenon his poetry is.'
Alberto Moravia
'Extraordinary! A great poet in Rome, an original poet... a rare poet.'
Sainte-Beuve
'There’s so much spice and wit in his poems… and the contemporary life of the Roman people is so realistically portrayed that you cannot help laughing out loud.'
Nikolai Gogol
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Read an excerpt from
Sonnets
