LEOPARDI, GIACOMO. - Poet, b. at Recanati on 29 June 1798 to the marchioness Adelaide Antici and to count Monaldo (v.), d. at Naples on 14 June 1837. His tutors were, until he was fifteen, his father, the Spanish Jesuit Giuseppe Maria De Torres, d. Sebastiano Sanchini, but above all the books of his father's library, rich in more than 16,000 volumes: in those rooms he spent "the best part" of himself and his youthful dream of being an illustrious philologist, translating from Homer, Hesiod, Isocrates, Epictetus, Virgil, Horace, Fronto, Eusebius, essays that he sent from time to time, with prefaces and annotations, to the Spettatore, to the Antologia, to the Nuovo Ricoglitore.
After an attempt to flee from Recanati, the spiritual crisis intensified in 1819: the loss of faith and of human hopes. Nor did the journey to Rome in Nov. 1822 help to distract him: his only emotion was the tomb of Tasso and, at bottom, a great nostalgia for the "natio borgo selvaggio". Between 1825 and 1828 he made various wanderings through the cities of Italy: to Milan, called by the publisher Stella for the plan of the Latin and Italian edition of the whole of Cicero's work; to Bologna, held back by his love for the Carniani-Malvezzi; to Florence, where he was comforted by the friendship of distinguished men of letters, especially Colletta, who proposed to him the publication of the Canti; to Pisa (the city he loved for its "benedettissimo clima"), which inspired in him the Risorgimento and A Silleia. Having returned one last time to Recanati ("la seconda notte"), he set out from it again two years then for a Florentine stay from 1830 to 1833;
he finally embraced the idea of a partnership with Ranieri,
repairing to Naples, where, despite the care and the rests
in the Vesuvian area, there increased in him "the daily and
incurable physical sufferings." Death reached him in this city.
Notable but not decisive, apart from the friendship with
Giordani, were his contacts with the men of his time: Mai,
Niebuhr, Vieusseux, Capponi, Colletta, Manzoni, Gioberti. No political fortune: acclaimed
deputy in 1831 for the Assembly of the united provinces,
he barely had time to refuse, before the Austrians
were already at Bologna. With the exception of Bunsen's offer
of the Dante chair at Bonn or Berlin, rare were
the recognitions of his fame among his contemporaries:
in Italy the chair of natural sciences at Parma was proposed
to him in 1829, and he was granted only the honorable mention from the Accademia della Crusca for the Operette morali
(the five-year prize had been awarded to Carlo Botta).
In the time of the pleasant deceits, with "seven years of mad
and most desperate study" he ruined his body forever:
the hunchback due to rickets, the extreme
weakness of his sight, for which he definitively renounced philology
by sending his manuscripts to De Sinner, reduced him
in his last year (the cataract of the right eye
and hydropericarditis supervened) to "a trunk that feels and suffers."
These notices are necessary prolegomena for understanding how the external appearance of things was gradually
shadowed, in his pathetic imagism, into a tragic and gloomy vision of history and of the world,
which he reached by means of a slow process of ideas
and of analysis of his feeling reflected in things. It is easy
to distinguish the points and the passages of this inner
development of his. The autobiographical novel Storia di
un'anima scritta da Giulio Rivalta, of which L. left
only notes, could constitute the exact title of
all his work. While for a spiritual biography
the first steps within the ambit of a religious conformism, perhaps weakly convinced,
as it manifests itself in the epilogue of the Saggio sopra gli errori
popolari degli antichi, in the Appressamento della morte in
Dantean tercets, in the sermons held in Recanati in the
chapel of the Congregazione dei Nobili (the same will have to be said
of the circumstance of the tonsure received at the hands
of Monsignor Bellini and of the ecclesiastical habit he
wore until the age of twenty), are of lesser interest, on the contrary
of principal significance have been 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 neither profound nor systematized."
The unutterable days dreamed by L. in the garden of the
Ricordanze were disturbed when harsh truth, that is
reason, unhinged the illusory paradise of his hopes and
made him feel an incurable detachment between the sweetness
first conceived and the new reality decidedly hostile to him,
and made the approach to youth appear almost like a
betrayal of his enchanted adolescence. Once the certainties of faith had fallen - Giordani contributed to this, according
to L.'s own testimony to Gioberti - he continued
the Foscolian inquiry, imagining being and the world
as creations of the I and action as the ultimate fruit of illusion. Following the sensist philosophy of the 18th century and accept-ing the negation of the spirit, L. saw before him
a pitiless and solitary nature rise up. This phase of his thought
is represented in the Zibaldone up to 1823. There fades
therefore before his eyes every possible happiness of existence:
the homeland, the dying Italy, lies under foreign servitude - in the Paralipomeni della Batracomomachia he accentuates
his irony against the political movements of his time -;
love is an unreachable phantom and fascinating only
in memory and in dream - it is the warning of Silvia and of Nerina -;
virtue is a larva that has no foundation (Bruto minore), and with the passing of youth man is fatally
driven toward the detested threshold of old age
(Il passero solitario). The myths disappear: there remains to him, as a vague
refuge, the Infinite, the metaphysical anxiety of the universal an-
cosmic anguish (Canto di un pastore errante nell'Asia) and still the conviction that nature, an indifferent spectator of man's tragedy (La ginestra), is the only enemy to be fought. To dispel, moreover, the "superbe fole" of former times, in the Operette morali (1st ed., Milan 1837) L. attempted a re-examination of the themes already suffered in the Canti (1st ed., Florence 1831), and in dialogues of exquisite literary craftsmanship he reasoned about the errors of men, of customs and of peoples, of 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), urging the characters, in whom his voice as a supreme poet is present, to define the mortal sickness inherent in all things (Cantico del gallo silvestre). Through the weariness of a life that finds no reason in its hopes, man falls, according to L., into the most sublime human feeling: ennui, that is, death in life: "il non poter essere soddisfatto da alcuna cosa terrena né dalla terra intera".
L.'s pessimism cannot be considered superseded by the idea of the love that must bind the human company together in struggle against destiny in mutual solidarity - it is the positive idea of the Ginestra which Pascoli wished to continue -, and yet the secret fascination of the Leopardian world lies in the fact that this pessimism, as De Sanctis acutely observed, "produces the opposite effect to that which it proposes. It does not believe in progress and makes you desire it; it does not believe in liberty and makes you love it. It calls love and glory and virtue illusions and kindles in your breast an unquenchable desire for them".
All this lives in the lyric poetry of the 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 the word newly discovered in its values and increased with wonder and power, a discovery that seems it must be recognized not only in the great idylls (L'infinito, Le ricordanze, A Silvia, Il sabato del villaggio), but in the whole vast zone no less rich and memorable of the other Canti, those of the elegiac, patriotic, classical moment, those of the passionate philosophical or Lucretian lyric, according to Carducci's classification.
The prose writer of the Operette morali, of the Pensieri, of the Zibaldone, of the Epistolario is in the line of an Attic simplicity open to profoundly human visions always coloured by a vague imagining.
Of Christianity L. thought that "conveniva in molte cose con il suo sistema della natura"; in the Nuovi Credenti he declared himself a defender of Job and of Solomon, and in inveighing against fate, in place of the name of God he substituted "fato indegno", "brutto poter", "Arimane", and to this maleficent power he wished to dedicate a hymn. But if we go back to the other hymn sketched to the Redeemer or to Mary or to the dialogue between Ranieri and L. cited by Brofferio (I miei tempi, III, Milan 1864, pp. 81-83), in which the poet reacts to the argument of faith's repugnance to reason ("perché la ragione del Leibnitz, di Newton, di Colombo non era ripugnante come la nostra?"), one must conclude that his negation was not definitive but wavering and tormented by doubts. Certainly in L. "quel desiderio di purezza estrema nell'amore non era cosa appresa dai classici, gli veniva dall'educazione cristiana; egli aveva una conoscenza sufficiente della propria religione e sufficiente chiarezza di pensiero per riconoscere che questa sola poteva conciliare la natura e la religione, ossia, nel suo linguaggio, fornire un fondamento ragionale alla sete di sacrificio proprio dei giovani e nobili cuori. These place L. very far above nineteenth-century rationalism and positivism, and although he no longer adhered to a positive faith, the impression of the divine remained indelible in his soul: he could not become frankly atheistic" (G. A. Levi). In L. the nostalgia for the faith of others and for that of his own childhood was certainly very strong, and erudition, poetry, thought were in him continually turned to the deepest questions of human existence. This spiritual anxiety of a seeker ("e mi sovvien l'eterno...") makes credible the report of his religious and Christian death. The Operette morali placed on the Index "donec corrigantur" (decr. 19 Apr. 1850).
Bibliography35 works
Giovanni Fallani