BELLI, GIUSEPPE GIOACCHINO. — Born in Rome on 7 Sept. 1791, died in Rome on 21 Dec. 1863. General Valentini, his paternal uncle, was shot in 1798; the young Belli followed his mother in flight to Naples. After the fall of the Roman Republic, his father obtained a position in Civitavecchia. In 1803 Belli was orphaned and entered the schools of the Collegio Romano. He then worked in the household of Prince Rospigliosi, then in that of the ecclesiastical receivership; later in the papal treasury, aided by subsidies from Cardinal Odescalchi. In 1810 he left the treasury with a small pension and for three years served as secretary in the household of Prince Stanislao Poniatowski. Lodovico Micara, later a cardinal, secured him a room in the Capuchin convent, 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 verse; he had translated the Psalms and composed the Battaglia celtica, the Bajazet, the eight-canto poem Le lamentazioni, and in terza rima the Pestilenza stata in Firenze l’anno di nostra salute 1348. Under the name “Tirteo Lacedemonio” he joined the Accademia Ellenica and the Tiberina, of which he was one of the founders. Present at the solemn gathering in 1814 to celebrate the return of Pius VII, he protested against the profanations of the temple, complaining “del ghermir dell’aquila grifagna.” In 1816 he married Maria Conti, widow of Count Giulio Pichi. She obtained for him from Cardinal Secretary of State Consalvi the position of third clerk in the office of the treasury of stamped paper and registry. To treat his hypochondria and other ailments, he made frequent summer trips to Naples, the Marches, Tuscany, Bologna, and Milan, where in 1827 he chanced upon the poetry of Carlo Porta, which 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 bounds. “I have resolved,” Belli wrote, “to leave a monument of what the Roman plebs is today. In it there is a certain kind of originality: and its language, its concepts, its character, its customs, its usages, its practices, its lights, its beliefs, its prejudices, its superstitions—all that moreover which concerns it—retains an imprint that is quite distinct from any other national character.... Not always chaste or pious, though devout and superstitious, the subject and form may appear: but this is the people; and this I reproduce, not inventing or embellishing anything.”
The complete edition of his works, edited by Pio Spezi (Rome 1944), offers a vast poetic production of more than 32,000 verses; it will be necessary to clarify the meaning to be attributed to the satires, so violent and often untrue, against the Pope and the men of the Curia. Belli was neither an opponent of the temporal power, nor a supporter of Italian unification, nor a liberal and anticlerical of the fashion of the day, nor did he, as Domenico Gnoli imagined, undergo spiritual crises. His life was that of an academic, faithful to the ideals of classicism, a passionate and patient scholar, a good citizen, “profound and sincere Catholic,” as the Osservatore Romano wrote at his death. The case of Belli—a Roman in a gown who savored 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 reproaches for his “inventions” that were irreligious and immoral, must be placed in the context of a true literary, not moral, conversion, arising from an artist’s concession to his exceptional romantic and dialectal inspiration. The sonnets are a poetic fact and not a political one (S. Negro), a singularly characteristic literary phenomenon that takes its cue from Porta’s poems and the dialectal force of the Roman plebs. This explains why Belli kept the sonnets to himself, did not publish them, indeed thought to destroy them, and on his death entrusted them to a bishop: Msgr. Tiziani, chief chaplain of the papal army.