LEOPARDI, GIACOMO

LEOPARDI, GIACOMO. - Poet, born at Recanati on 29 June 1798 to Marchioness Adelaide Antici and Count Monaldo (q.v.), died at Naples on 14 June 1837. His tutors until the age of fifteen were his father, the Spanish Jesuit Giuseppe Maria De Torres, and Sebastiano Sanchini, but above all the books in his father’s library, which contained more than 16,000 volumes: in those rooms he spent “the best part” of himself and his youthful dream of becoming a distinguished philologist, translating from Homer, Hesiod, Isocrates, Epictetus, Virgil, Horace, Fronto, Eusebius, essays which he sent from time to time, with prefaces and notes, to Lo Spettatore, L’Antologia, and Il Nuovo Ricoglitore.

After an attempted escape from Recanati, his spiritual crisis deepened in 1819: the loss of faith and of human hopes. Nor did his journey to Rome in November 1822 distract him; the only emotion he felt was at the tomb of Tasso, and beneath it a great longing for his “native savage village.” Between 1825 and 1828 he wandered through various Italian cities: to Milan, summoned by the publisher Stella to plan a Latin and Italian edition of Cicero’s complete works; to Bologna, detained by his love for the Countess Carniani-Malvezzi; to Florence, where he was sustained by the friendship of eminent men of letters, especially Colletta, who proposed publishing the Canti; to Pisa (the city he loved for its “most blessed climate”), which inspired him to write Il Risorgimento and A Silvia. Returning for the last time to Recanati (“the second night”), he left again two years later.

(photo Enit)
LEOPARDI, GIACOMO - Portrait painted by Lolli (1826).
Recanati, Casa Leopardi.

After a stay in Florence from 1830 to 1833;
he finally embraced the idea of associating with Ranieri
by moving to Naples, where, despite care and rest
in the Vesuvian area, his « daily and incurable physical
sufferings » grew worse. Death overtook him in this city.

Notable but not decisive, apart from his friendship with Giordani, were his contacts with the men of his time: Mai, Niebuhr, Vieusseux, Capponi, Colletta, Manzoni, Gioberti. He had no political fortune: acclaimed deputy in 1831 for the Assembly of the United Provinces, he had barely time to refuse when the Austrians were already in Bologna. Apart from Bunsen’s offer of the Dante chair at Bonn or Berlin, rare were the recognitions of his fame among contemporaries: in Italy he was offered in 1829 the chair of natural sciences at Parma and was granted only an honorable mention by the Accademia della Crusca for the Operette morali (the five-year prize had been awarded to Carlo Botta). In the time of pleasant delusions, with « seven years of mad and most desperate study » he ruined his body forever: the hunchback from rickets, the extreme weakness of his sight, which made him definitively abandon philology by sending his manuscripts to De Sinner, reduced him in his last year (cataract of the right eye and hydropericarditis arrived) to « a trunk that feels and suffers ».

These details are necessary preliminaries to understand how the external appearance of things was gradually overshadowed, in his pathetic imaginativeness, by a tragic and gloomy vision of history and the world, which he reached through a slow process of ideas and analysis of his own feeling reflected in things. It is easy to distinguish the points and stages of this inner development. The autobiographical novel Storia di un’anima written by Giulio Rivalta, of which L. left only notes, might well constitute the exact title of all his work. As for a spiritual biography, of lesser interest are his first steps within a religious conformism, perhaps weakly held, as is shown in the epilogue of the Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi, in the Appressamento della morte in terza rima, and in the sermons he delivered in Recanati in the chapel of the Congregazione dei Nobili (one should say as much of the circumstance of his tonsure at the hands of Mons. Bellini and of the ecclesiastical habit he wore until he was twenty). On the contrary, of principal significance are the notes for the Inni sacri and all the attempts included in the Zibaldone to prove that his ideology was not opposed to Christianity. An ideology that is not a philosophy, as Croce observes, since it consists of « scattered observations not deepened or systematized ».

The unforgettable days dreamed by L. in the garden of Memories were disturbed when harsh truth, namely reason, shattered the illusory paradise of his hopes and made him feel an irreparable separation between the sweetness first conceived and the new reality, which was decisively hostile to him, and made the arrival of youth seem almost like a betrayal of his enchanted adolescence. With the collapse of the certainties of faith—Giordani contributed to this, according to L.’s own testimony to Gioberti—he continued Foscolo’s inquiry, imagining being and the world as creations of the self and action as the ultimate fruit of illusion. Following the sensist philosophy of the 18th century and accepting the negation of the spirit, L. saw before him a pitiless and solitary nature. This phase of his thought is represented in the Zibaldone up to 1823. Thus, every possible happiness in existence vanished from his eyes: the fatherland, dying Italy, lay beneath foreign servitude—in the Paralipomeni della Batracomomachia he accentuates his irony toward contemporary political movements—; love is a phantom unattainable and fascinating only in memory and dream—it is the admonition of Silvia and Nerina—; virtue is a specter without foundation (Bruto minore), and with the passing of youth, man is inevitably driven toward the hated threshold of old age (Il passero solitario). The myths disappear: what remains for him, as a vague refuge, is the Infinite, the metaphysical yearning for the universal an-
LEOPARDI, GIACOMO - Autograph of the canzone "Sul monumento di Dante che si prepara in Firenze" - Recanati, Casa Leopardi.

(photo: Vatican Library)
LEOPARDI, GIACOMO - Letter to Angelo Mai (30 March 1821) in which he asks to be appointed «Professor of Latin Language» at the Vatican Library - Vatican Library, cod. lat. 12895.

cosmic shudder (Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia) and still the conviction that nature, an indifferent spectator of man’s tragedy (The Broom), is the only enemy to be fought. To annihilate then the « proud fables » of an earlier time, in the Operette morali (1st ed., Milan 1837) Leopardi re-examined the themes already suffered in the Canti (1st ed., Florence 1831), and in dialogues of exquisite literary craft he reasoned about the errors of men, of customs and peoples, the vanity of glory (Il Parini), of love (Di Torquato Tasso e del suo genio familiare), of philosophy (Detti memorabili di Filippo Ottonieri), of nature and death (Dialogo della natura e di un islandese, Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue mummie), driving the characters, in whom his voice as supreme poet is present, to define the mortal sickness inherent in all things (Cantico del gallo silvestre). Because life’s weariness finds no reason in its hopes, man, according to Leopardi, falls into the most sublime human sentiment: boredom, that is, death in life: « the inability to be satisfied by any earthly thing nor by the earth itself ».

Leopardi’s pessimism cannot be overcome by the idea of love that must bind human companionship in struggle against destiny in mutual solidarity — it is the positive idea of The Broom that Pascoli wished to continue — yet the secret fascination of the Leopardi world lies in the fact that this pessimism, as De Sanctis keenly perceived, « produces the opposite effect to that which it proposes. He does not believe in progress and yet makes you desire it; he does not believe in freedom and yet makes you love II. He calls love, glory, and virtue illusions and yet kindles in your breast an unquenchable desire for them ».

All this lives in the lyric poetry of greatest perfection that Italy has had after Dante and Petrarch, in a miraculous succession of images, in a chaste and sober language worthy of the ancient Greeks, in a measured richness of words rediscovered in their values and heightened with wonder and power — a discovery that seems to be recognized not only in the great idylls (L’infinito, Le ricordanze, A Silvia, Il sabato del villaggio) but in the entire vast and equally rich and memorable zone of the other Canti, those of the elegiac, patriotic, classical moment, those of impassioned philosophical or Lucretian lyric, according to Carducci’s classification.

The prose writer of the Operette morali, the Pensieri, the Zibaldone, and the Epistolario stands in the line of an Attic simplicity open to profoundly human visions always tinged with a vague imagining.

Del cristianesimo the L. believed that « it agreed in many things with his system of nature »; in the Nuovi Credenti he declared himself a defender of Job and Solomon, and in cursing fate, he substituted for the name of God « unworthy fate », « ugly power », « Arimane », and wished to dedicate a hymn to this maleficent power. But if we turn to the other hymn sketched to the Redeemer or to Mary or to the dialogue between Ranieri and the L. cited by Brofferio (I miei tempi, III, Milano 1864, pp. 81-83), in which the poet reacts to the argument of the repugnance of faith to reason (« why was the reason of Leibniz, of Newton, of Columbus not repugnant like ours? »), we must conclude that his denial was not final but wavering and tormented by doubts. Certainly in the L. « that desire for extreme purity in love was not something learned from the classics; it came from Christian education; he had sufficient knowledge of his own religion and sufficient clarity of thought to recognize that only this could reconcile nature and religion, or, in his own language, provide a rational foundation for the thirst for sacrifice peculiar to young and noble hearts. This places the L. far above 19th-century rationalism and positivism, and although he no longer adhered to a positive faith, the impression of the divine remained indelibly in his soul: he could not become frankly atheistic » (G. A. Levi). In the L. the longing for the faith of others and for his own childhood faith was certainly very strong, and erudition, poetry, and thought were in him continually directed toward the deepest questions of human existence. This spiritual anxiety of the seeker (« and the eternal comes to mind... ») makes credible the account of his religious and Christian death. The Operette morali were placed on the Index « donec corrigantur » (decr. 19 Apr. 1850).

cini, G. L. e la filosofia cristiana, Napoli 1937; M. Losacco, Indagini leopardiane, Lanciano 1937; M. Puppo, L. e il suo tempo, Roma 1937; Il Frontespizio, numero unico, sett., Firenze 1937; G. L., a cura di I. De Blasi (letture al Lyceum di Firenze), ivi 1938; R. Vuoli, Leggende e verità intorno a G. L. (conferenze Univers. Catt. del S. Cuore), Milano 1938; L. Federici, Conversione e sepoltura di G. L. nel racconto di A. Ranieri, Recanati 1938; G. Rovella, Falo scandalo leopardiano, in Civ. Catt., 1941, 1, pp. 136-46; G. A. Levi, G. L. fra Arimane e Dio, in Osservatore romano, n. 286, 7-8 dic. 1942; G. Natali, Viaggio col L. nell'Italia letteraria, Milano 1943; G. De Robertis, Saggio sul L., Firenze 1944; G. Natali, Corso e ricorso della poesia leopardiana, Roma 1948; C. Nifosi, La filosofia del L., Modica 1949; G. Crocioni, L. e le tradizioni popolari, Milano 1949.

Giovanni Fallani