Trilussa's dialect poetry shows the human comedy of everyday life of the Roman streets, filled with lower-middle-class people. The protagonists of his best poems are clerks, waiters, porters, maids, barbers, seamstresses, or aristocrats fallen from their social status. Large families inhabit filthy dwellings among the squalid sections of Rome; self-interest and the effort to survive make them resentful and hypocritical. Trilussa keeps an ironic distance from this world, depicting its essential outline without penetrating below its surface. His poetic investigation is photographic; it anticipates by fifty years the humor and tone of the cinematic sequences found in the Italian comedy of Cinecittà in the 1950s.

Carlo Alberto Salustri (who used the nom de plume Trilussa) grew up in what was then a predominantly agrarian city, dominated by the clergy and the landed aristocracy. After Rome became the new capital, the aristocracy got involved in construction, land development...