Writing clandestine sonnets in local dialect for more than 15 years while leading a respectably conformist life of letters and bureaucracy, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli erected a lasting poetical monument to the people of 19th-century Rome. Set against the checkered background of the city of the six P's: pope, priests, princes, prostitutes, parasites, and the poors. 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.