Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli composed nearly 2,000 sonnets between 1829 and 1849. Belli was a Roman “people’s poet” and “plebian philosopher” who wrote satirical poetry that he delivered in local bars until his later years when he worked as an official censor for the papacy, obliterating the works of Verdi, Rossini, and Shakespeare from collective access. Belli’s Petrarchan sonnets range from portraiture to the grotesque to the laugh-aloud owing to his formal skill and masterful wit aimed at major political figures and offices from his Rome.