GIACOMINO da VERONA. - Franciscan poet of the second half of the 13th century, about whom no other biographical details are known. His work belongs to the 13th-century didactic-religious literature that flourished in northern Italy, to which he contributes a personal descriptive interest and a more free-flowing moralizing tone.
In the two short poems De Ierusalem coelesti and De Babylonia civitate infernali he sings, drawing on the Apocalypse, with a naïveté and primitive imagination almost barbaric in its crudeness—at times darkening into grotesquerie—the joys of paradise and the torments of hell: coarse material that in Dante’s Commedia will find its definitive voice. Some critics are inclined to attribute to him also certain lauds of the Virgin, a Passion, a Resurrection, and other sacred lyrics.