In the cultural climate closure of the Rome of the Pope, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1863), an obscure employee of the papal administration dusty frequenter of literary academies, writes in a semi-clandestine 2,279 sonnets in Romanesco surprising, the dialect of his city. In each, a first-person narrator tells of sex, violence, religion, and misery, death and abuse of power, running a wide variety of records, from the wildest to the most intense philosophical meditation comedy.The set of his poems is a polyphonic, powerful, timeless work of high poetic quality, a very peculiar case of a subordinate literary use of language that gives us a vision "from below" the greatness and misery of a city and reveals the most intimate and hidden impulses of our consciences. We are, in the end, to a masterpiece of European poetry of all time, presented here for the first time in an annotated anthology for the Spanish reader