one of the arrests was due to procuring an abortion for a certain Antonella Testa, daughter of the mayor of Naples, but whether she was pregnant by Marino or one of his friends is unknown; the second conviction (for which he risked a capital sentence) was due to the poet's forging episcopal bulls in order to save a friend who had been involved in a duel. But some witnesses, who include both Marino's detractors (such as Tommaso Stigliani) and defenders (such as the printer and biographer Antonio Bulifoni in a life of the poet which appeared in 1699) have firmly asserted that Marino, much of whose love poetry is heavily ambiguous, had homosexual tendencies. Elsewhere, the reticence of the sources on this subject is obviously due to the persecutions to which "sodomitical practices" were particularly subject during the Counterreformation. Marino then fled Naples and moved to Rome, first joining the service of Melchiore Crescenzio then that of Cardinal Aldobrandini. In 1608 he moved to the court of Duke Carlo Emanuele I in Turin. This was not an easy time for the poet, in fact he was the victim of an assassination attempt by his rival Gaspare Murtola. He was later sentenced to a year in prison, probably for malicious gossip he had written about the duke. In 1615 he left Turin and moved to Paris, where he remained until 1623, honoured by the court and admired by French literary circles. He returned to Italy in triumph and died in Naples in 1625. Works Marino wrote a large amount, both in prose and verse. His poetry remains the most admired and imitated part of his work. Poetry Le Rime (1602) and La lira (1614) Marino originated a new, "soft, graceful and attractive" style for a new public, distancing himself from Torquato Tasso and Renaissance Petrarchism as well as any kind of Aristotelian rule. His new approach can be seen in the Rime of 1602, later expanded under the title La lira (The Lyre) in 1614, which is made up of erotic verse, encomiastic and sacred pieces, arranged either by theme (sea poems, rustic poems, love poems, funereal poems, religious poems) or by verse form (madrigal, canzone). They often hark back to the Classical traditions of Latin and Greek literature, with a particular fondness for the love poems of Ovid and the Dolce stil nuovo tradition of Italian verse, showing a strong