Francesco Maria Piave, the famous Milanese librettist, was a friend of Belli, and whenever he passed by his windows at night, to greet him and make him laugh, he would sing a choral dirge, which he himself had adapted, four verses written by a Pindus donkey, when all of Naples joined in the prayers of Charles III of Bourbon, who ardently desired an heir to the throne. Belli himself recounts the event in a note to an unpublished Italian sonnet, addressed to Piave in 1838. It is presumably the present sonnet.