Giacomo Leopardi

Childhood and family

Giacomo Leopardi was born on 29 June 1798 in the family palazzo in Recanati, a small town in the Marche on the Adriatic coast, close to Loreto and then part of the Papal States. He belonged to an old noble family whose title could be traced back to the year 1200. His father, Count Monaldo, was a local scholar with reactionary views who squandered much of the family fortune on failed financial ventures, though he built up a formidable library. His mother, Adelaide Antici, of a marquisal family, was a woman of rigid Catholic faith and severe thrift, who imposed many sacrifices on her children and her husband in an effort to restore the family's faded standing. Giacomo was the eldest of a large brood, though only Carlo, Paolina and Pierfrancesco survived childhood.

Education

The children were taught by learned religious tutors, among them the Jesuit José Torres and Abbot Sanchini, who introduced them to literature and the sciences. Leopardi, however, educated himself largely in his father's library. From early childhood he suffered a serious spinal deformity, probably Pott's disease, which bent his back and denied him a normal youth. He spent his days reading and studying, often late into the night. At eleven he was reading Homer, at thirteen he wrote his first tragedy and at fourteen the second, Pompey in Egypt, an anti-Caesar work that defends republican liberties. By fifteen he had mastered seven languages, including the classical tongues, Hebrew and several modern ones, and had studied history, philosophy, philology, the natural sciences and astronomy. His History of Astronomy of 1813 compiles the knowledge accumulated in that field up to his time. That same year he wrote his Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients, which treats the fantasies of antiquity as the childhood of the human species.

Crisis and first poems

Around 1815 Leopardi's health worsened, with fevers, lung problems, pain and a gradual loss of sight. He blamed much of his suffering on excessive study and the cramped postures of long days in the library. That physical crisis was also a crisis of faith. After receiving the tonsure in 1810, his reading of the French encyclopedists led him to abandon religion, and from then on his view of the world grew empirical and mechanistic, influenced by thinkers such as Locke. In 1816 he wrote L'appressamento della morte, in which death appears as a comfort. That year he moved away from philology and towards poetry, following an increasingly intense correspondence with the humanist Pietro Giordani, who became his friend and editor. From 1817 he kept up a steady exchange of letters with Giordani and other liberal intellectuals, and in 1818 he wrote two patriotic poems, All'Italia and Sopra il monumento di Dante, in a classical and openly secular and liberal tone. That same year he began the notebook known as the Zibaldone, which he kept for fifteen years.

Attempts to escape and journeys

His relationship with his father steadily deteriorated. In 1819 Leopardi tried to flee Recanati for Rome, but was intercepted and taken back home. His letters to the patriot Montani, intercepted by his father, were evidence of that constant surveillance. In the following years his travels followed the same pattern of flight and return: Rome in 1822 and 1823, where he was disillusioned by the city's corruption, Milan and Bologna in 1825, Florence in 1830, and Rome again in 1831. In Florence he met Antonio Ranieri, who became his inseparable friend and first biographer. In 1827 he met Alessandro Manzoni, though the two did not see eye to eye. In 1828 he turned down a professorship offered in Bonn or Berlin because of his poor health. He supported himself through private tutoring and editorial work, including the Crestomazia della prosa e della poesia italiane he prepared for a Milan bookseller.

Major works and thought

His principal works are the Canzoni of 1824, the Versi of 1826, the Operette morali of 1827 and the Canti, whose first edition appeared in Florence in 1831 and the definitive one in Naples in 1835. The Operette morali are twenty-four fictional dialogues and essays of philosophical intent, some satirical in tone, in which he sets out his pessimism. Leopardi's thought starts from the idea that nature is indifferent, if not cruel, to human beings, who are condemned to desire a happiness they never attain. Yet he did not settle into simple despair: he found consolation in the memory of youth, in the beauty of nature and in solidarity among people facing a common fate. His style fused neoclassical form with profoundly romantic content, giving his verse an unusual formal perfection. Poems such as L'infinito, A Silvia, Le ricordanze and Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia show that blend of precision and melancholy. In his last period, with La ginestra, written in 1836 at a villa on the slopes of Vesuvius, he left a poetic testament proposing human solidarity as the only defence against nature.

Final years and death

In 1830 he left Recanati for the last time, thanks to financial help from Tuscan friends. His health continued to decline, and his affections were almost always unrequited, as with Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti, who inspired the poem Aspasia. In 1833 he settled in Naples with Ranieri, hoping the climate would help him. He died there in 1837, during the cholera epidemic, probably of pulmonary oedema or heart failure. Thanks to Ranieri's intervention he was not buried in a common grave, though the account of that burial is disputed and his remains may have ended up in a cholera cemetery. In 1900 his tomb was moved to the Parco Virgiliano and declared a national monument.

Reception and legacy

His work was slow to win recognition in Italy, where for a long time he was read more as a poet of sadness than as a thinker. Over time he came to be regarded as the greatest Italian lyric poet of the nineteenth century and as a major thinker, and the Zibaldone is now counted among the great intellectual works of his century. In Spain, Juan Valera first made him known in 1855, and later readers included Miguel de Unamuno, who translated La retama, and Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. Among the Spanish-language poets who felt his influence are Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén and Antonio Colinas.