The Ritmo is preserved in manuscript 552–32 of the Abbey of Montecassino (whence its name). The manuscript is from the eleventh-century, but the poem was only copied into it in the late twelfth or early thirteenth, judging from the handwriting. The poet's dialect is "central–southern Italian". Each strophe is composed of monorhyming ottonari and a concluding monorhymed couplet or tercet of endecasillabi, though there are metrical and linguistic irregularities. The poet is indebted to an unnamed Latin source, scriptura, possibly the Bible. It has been speculated, based on internal references to fegura (figure, allegory, picture, drawing), that the poem may have been performed by a giullare with visual aids.
