Cesare Pascarella was a poet in Roman dialect, a painter and a draughtsman. From his early childhood he manifested a character intolerant of rules and institutions, to such a degree that he ran away from the seminary of Frascati and devoted himself to politics and to the social events that followed the Breach of Porta Pia. In any case he finished his studies and immediately after registered at the Fine Arts Institute, which he attended irregularly, but showing considerable progress. He became a fashionable painter and took part in the group of XXIV of the Roman Countryside, whose intention it was to offer a realistic picture of landscape and animals. Pascarella devoted himself to this activity with great enthusiasm and benefited from it, making acquaintances that gave him the possibility, at only twenty-two, to publish his first sonnets. In 1883 he began to write for Fanfulla della Domenica. Pascarella's life was later a succession of trips (to Japan, North America, Africa, Egypt, South America, India) of which there are traces in the Taccuini, witty and often very effective pages, that show the poet's caustic power of observation and his pictorial, as well as human, eye.