Virgilio Giotti
Virgil Schönbeck (15 January 1885 – 21 September 1957), known by his pen name Virgilio Giotti, was an Italian poet writing both in Italian and in the Triestine dialect. Giotti's poetry "which is not so much linked to the vernacular tradition as to contemporary poetry in the Italian language, from Pascoli and the Crepuscolari to hermeticism, uses the dialect to give more intimate vibration to its lyrical motifs, now inspired by a loving or familiar, serene or painful intimacy, now by nature, by the landscape, by the minute life of his city; in forms that from the musicality of the canzonetta approach more and more, and with ever greater grace, an epigrammatic essentiality." He has been credited as one of the great Italian poets of the 20th century, and is regarded as the greatest Triestine dialect poet. Biography He was born in Trieste, at the time still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 15 January 1885, the son of Riccardo Schönbeck, a native of Kolín, Bohemia, of German descent, and Emilia Ghiotto, a Venetian, from whose surname he derived his pseudonym. In 1907 he moved with his family to Florence to escape the Hapsburg draft and for several years was