Short answers, pulled from the story.
Felice Romani was an Italian poet, scholar, and opera librettist born in Genoa on the 31st of January 1788. He was considered the finest Italian librettist between Metastasio and Boito, producing nearly one hundred librettos over his career. He died in Moneglia on the 28th of January 1865.
Romani wrote librettos for Bellini's Il pirata, La sonnambula, and Norma, and for Donizetti's Anna Bolena and L'elisir d'amore. He also supplied texts for Rossini's Il turco in Italia and Bianca e Falliero. An early libretto he wrote for Adalbert Gyrowetz was later used by Giuseppe Verdi for Un giorno di regno.
Romani and Vincenzo Bellini collaborated on seven operas between 1827 and 1833, including Norma, La sonnambula, and Beatrice di Tenda. Bellini described Romani as his ideal creative match and is quoted as saying: "Give me good verses and I will give you good music." Their partnership ended in a dispute over the libretto for Beatrice di Tenda.
The two fell out because Romani missed the deadline for the Beatrice di Tenda libretto in 1833. The dispute was serious enough that Bellini set his next opera, I puritani, with a different librettist, Carlo Pepoli. Romani expressed his regrets in an obituary he wrote after Bellini's death.
Romani produced nearly one hundred librettos during his career. He began by writing two texts for the composer Simon Mayr, which earned him an appointment as official librettist for La Scala. Many individual librettos were later set by multiple composers across several decades.
In 1834, Romani became editor of the Gazzetta Ufficiale Piemontese, contributing literary criticism. He held the post with one interruption from 1849 to 1854, until his death in 1865. He also published a collection of lyric poems in 1841 and wrote his last opera libretto, Cristina di Svezia, for Sigismond Thalberg in 1855.