GIACOMINO da VERONA. - A Franciscan poet of the second half of the thirteenth century, concerning whom no other biographical information is known. His production forms part of the thirteenth-century didactic-religious literature flourishing in northern Italy, to which he contributes a personal descriptive interest and a freer moralizing tone.
In the two short poems De Ierusalem coelesti and De Babylonia civitate infernali, following the Apocalypse, he sings, with a naïveté and primitiveness of almost barbaric imagination, at times darkening into the grotesque, of the joys of paradise and the torments of hell: crude material which in Dante’s Commedia would find its definitive voice. Some critics are inclined to attribute to him also several lauds to the Virgin, a Passione, a Resurrezione, and other sacred lyrics.