1923:   Born in Lisbon on August 9th.
His father, with a dominating and pragmatic personality, was a goldsmith businessman, with
shop and workshop on Rua da Palma, in the parish of Santa Justa, in downtown Lisbon.
After primary school, his father sent young Mário to attend Liceu Gil Vicente,
after which, after a year, in order to continue the family business,
changed him to a chiseling course at the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts.
At António Arroio Cesariny he would meet Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas and Fernando José
Francis. Having completed the chiseling course, as he did not like the work of a goldsmith,
attended a qualification course at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, which did not
came to attend. He also studied music, free of charge, with the composer
Fernando Lopes Graça. Cesariny was a talented pianist, but the enraged father
forbade him to continue these studies.
Since his late teens, Cesariny and his friends have attended several gatherings in the
Lisbon cafés and discover neorealism and then surrealism.

1947: Cesariny travels to Paris where, thanks to a scholarship, he attends the Académie de la
Great Chaumiere. It is around this time, while in Paris, that Cesariny visits André Breton. When he left Paris, in the same year of 1947, and influenced by Breton, he pushed the
creation of the Grupo Surrealista de Lisboa, with figures such as António Pedro,
José Augusto França, Cândido Costa Pinto, Vespeira, João Moniz Pereira and Alexandre
O'Neill. The group, which met at the Pastelaria Mexicana, emerged as a form of libertarian protest
against the neo-realism movement, dominated by the Portuguese Communist Party, by
at the same time that it also did not align with the Salazar regime. Later, he founded the anti-group (dissident) Os Surrealistas, followed by António Maria Lisboa, Risques Pereira, Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas, Pedro Oom, Fernando José
Francisco and Mário-Henrique Leiria.

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1950 to 1980: In this decade, Cesariny dedicates himself to painting, but also, and above all, to poetry, which he writes in cafes. He collaborated with the magazine Pirâmide (1959-1960). Its editor is Luiz Pacheco, with whom later (in the 1970s) he would become completely incompatible. It is also during this period that he begins to be harassed and watched by the Judiciary Police, for "suspected vagrancy", forced to
humiliating introductions and regular interrogations, due to his homosexuality, which he experiences daily, frankly and fearlessly. Only from April 25, 1974 will he stop being harassed and harassed by the police.
Cesariny lived with financial difficulties, helped by his family. despite the
excellence of his writing, it did not support him financially and, from the mid-1960s, he would end up dedicating himself entirely to painting, as a means of subsistence. From the 1980s onwards, Cesariny's poetic work was reedited by the editor Manuel Hermínio Monteiro and rediscovered by a new generation of readers.
In the last years of his life, Cesariny lives with his older sister, Henriette (who died in 2004), in an apartment at Rua de Basílio Teles, 6 - 3º, in Campolide, Lisbon. Contrary to what happened before, it opens up to the means of
communication giving frequent interviews and talking about his intimate life.

2004: Miguel Gonçalves Mendes directs the documentary Autografia, an intense and
moving where Cesariny exposes himself and reveals himself in a total way.

2006 : Mário Cesariny dies on 26 November and on 8 December 2016, the poet's remains were transferred to an individual tomb, in a ceremony presided over by the President of the Republic Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, with the presence of the Mayor of Lisbon, Fernando Medina, from the Minister of Culture,
Luís Filipe Castro Mendes, the cultural director of the EDP Foundation, José Manuel dos Santos, and Teresa Caeiro, representing the family. Cesariny will have a funerary monument with sculpture designed by Manuel Rosa. During his lifetime, he donates his estate to the Cupertino de Miranda Foundation and, in his will, leaves one million euros to Casa Pia.