BELLI, GIUSEPPE GIOACHINO. - Born in Rome on Sept. 7, 1791, died in Rome on Dec. 21, 1863. General Valentini, his paternal uncle, was shot in 1798; as a child B. followed his mother in flight toward Naples. After the fall of the Roman Republic his father obtained a post at Civitavecchia. In 1803 B. was left an orphan and entered the schools of the Roman College. He was then employed in the bookkeeping office of Prince Rospigliosi, then in that of the ecclesiastical spogli; afterward in the landed property administration, helped by subsidies from Card. Odescalchi. In 1810 he left the landed property administration with a small allowance, and for three years held the office of secretary in the house of Prince Stanislao Poniatowski. Lodovico Micara, later a cardinal, obtained for him a room in the convent of the Capuchins, where he learned English and French and deepened his knowledge of the physical and mathematical sciences.
As early as 1807 he had begun to write verses; he had translated the Psalms and composed the Battaglia celtica, the Bojazette, the short poem in eight cantos Le lamentazioni, and in terza rima the Pastilenza stata in Firenze l'anno di nostra salute 1348. Under the name of "Tirteo Lacedemonio" he entered the Accademia Ellenica and the Tiberina, of which he was one of the founders. Present at the solemn assembly in 1814 to celebrate the return of Pius VII, he protested against the profanations of the temple, complaining "of the seizing of the griffin eagle." In 1816 he married Maria Conti, widow of Count Giulio Pichi. She obtained for him from the Secretary of State Consalvi the post of third clerk in the office of the landed property administration of stamped paper and registry. To treat his hypochondria and other ailments, he made frequent journeys in summer to Naples, the Marche, Tuscany, Bologna and Milan, where in 1827 the poems of Carlo Porta happened to fall into his hands, and these exercised a great influence on him. From 1831 to 1846, that is, during the pontificate of Gregory XVI, the fecundity of his muse knew no limits. "I have resolved - writes B. - to leave a monument of what the Roman plebs is today. In it there lies a certain type of originality: and its language, its notions, its character, its custom, its usages, its practices, its lights, its belief, its prejudices, its superstitions, and moreover all that concerns it, retains an imprint that is very likely quite distinct from any other character of a people... Not chaste, not pious at times, though devout and superstitious, the matter and the form will appear: but the people is this; and this I copy, not to propose a model, but rather to give a faithful image of something already existing."
In 1837 his wife died; he then became more unmanageable and misanthropic than ever: he left the Palazzo Poli, dismissed the servants, and withdrew to live with some relatives at Via Monte della Farina, no. 11. In 1840 he asked the Pope for a post, and obtained that of assistant in the secretariat of the directorate of the public debt, and in 1842 that of head of correspondence. In 1848 he deplored the killing of Pellegrino Rossi; the following year, frightened by the revolution, he hurled a sonnet against Mazzini. In 1852 he composed twelve chapters and ten sermons against modern civilization and dedicated them to the editors of the Civiltà cattolica. He translated the hymns of the Roman Breviary and composed two short poems in ottava rima on the Passion of Christ. He was a theatrical censor and treasurer of the Conference of St. Vincent de Paul.
The universal significance of B.'s poetry is given by the classicism with which the author sets up the vast web of his vivid observations, entering the circles where the contrast is laid bare between the sumptuous manner of a pagan tradition and the unprepared, artless attitude of the common people, who attempt an interpretation of that other noble life, so unusual to them, without reverence and without mystery. This new epic imposes itself through the definition of hundreds of characters and spectacles: the women of the markets, the artisans within the bonds of the old city, who alternate with ecclesiastics and sovereigns in the biting and shameless tone of the vernacular; it is the eternal contrast of great and small passions brought onto the plane of art; a mixture of religiosity and superstition, of liturgy and street, of reserve and obscenity, sustained by the force of the dialogues, by the spontaneous flow of the hendecasyllables, by the epigrammatic concluding thrust of the sonnet.
The edition of the Sonetti romaneschi by Morandi (Città di Castello 1886-89) and the unpublished works edited by E. Vergara Caffarelli and G. R. Ansaldi: Centocenti sonetti romaneschi, rediscovered and annotated by Pio Spezi (Rome 1944), offer us a vast poetic output of over 32,000 lines; it will be necessary to define the meaning to be attributed to the satires so violent and more often shameless against the Pope and the men of the Curia. B. was neither an opponent of the temporal dominion, nor a supporter of the unity of Italy, nor the fashionable liberal and anticlerical; nor were there in him, as Domenico Gnoli fancied, any spiritual crises. His life was that of a scholar, faithful to the ideals of classicism, a passionate and patient erudite, a good citizen, a "profound and sincere Catholic," as the "Osservatore Romano" wrote at his death. The case of B. — a Roman in toga who experienced all the pleasure of speaking in the manner of the people — ("a Papa Grigorio je volevo bene perché me dava er gusto de potenne di male"), with all the reservations and reproofs for his irreligious and immoral "inventions," must be placed on the line of a genuine literary and not moral conversion, due to a concession of the artist to his exceptional romantic and dialectal inspiration. The sonnets are a fact of poetry and not a political fact (S. Negro), a literary phenomenon singularly characteristic, which takes its start from the poems of Porta and from the dialectal force of the plebs of Rome. This explains how B. kept the sonnets for himself, did not give them to the press, even thought of destroying them, and entrusted them at his death to a bishop: Monsignor Tizzani, major chaplain of the pontifical army.