I'm also very new to Lisp, so take what I say with a chunk of salt. 
CFFI (the Luis branch) appears to be the best new kid on the block. 
>From what I see it generally works better than the older UFFI, and is
under pretty heavy development/maintenance.  On the downside, it is
under heavy development/maintenance :)
Verrazano is a different beast, it generates CFFI code from C/C++
headers.  I recommend giving this a shot - if nothing else you'll
learn a lot & may be able to submit bugs to the VZN team, who are very
responsive.

Personally, I think that auto-generating bindings is the way to go -
assuming that those bindings are not hugely ugly.  My reasoning is
that if you can create a binding that builds directly from the C
headers, then you can trivially track changes in the C library.  For
example, cl-ncurses appears to have stopped active maintenance in
2004, and therefore has tracked no further changes to the original
library.

I like the idea of a "meta-binding" package, which at install time
would look at the C headers & generate a binding.  As part of the
meta-binding you could write a layer that interfaced with the auto
generated bindings & put a more Lispy spin on it.  In that way any you
track the C headers of a package more closely & any breakages are
explicit (ie will blow up during install), rather than implicit (ie, a
C function may have a different signature from what the manual binding
expects).

Cheers
Brad
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