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Conte Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) |
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Italian scholar, poet, and philosopher, one of the great writers of the 19th century. Leopardi was a contemporary of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, with whom he shared a similar pessimistic view of life and human nature. "I have read him repeatedly with great pleasure; but I like his prose much better than his verse," Schopenhauer said. In his late years, when he lived on the slopes of Vesuvius, Leopardi meditated upon the possibility of the total destruction of humankind. Leopardi's love problems inspired some of his saddest lyrics. Nature has no more care Giacomo Leopardi was born into the provincial nobility of the small town of Recanati,
belonging to the Papal States. The palazzo
of the family was the most important building of the city. Giacomo's
father, Count Monaldo Leopardi, was a man of high virtue, and the last
aristocrat in Italy to wear a sword. A local patriot, he once said: "I
would always choose a hut, a book, and an onion at the top of a
mountain, rather than hold a subordinate position in Rome." At
Napoleon's entrance in the Marches region in 1797, he had the
opportunity to see the General, but he ignored the whole occasion. When Conte Monaldo's generosity and extravagance threatened to
ruin
the whole family, he was forced to turn the management of his affairs
over to an agent of his wife, the marquise Adelaide Antici Mattei.
Adelaide ran the household from 1803; in this task she was admired and
feared and managed to rescue her family from ruinous debts. From the age of six, Leopardi dressed in black like his
father. He
studied privately, showing remarkable
talents and eventualy outlearned his tutors. By the age of 16 Leopardi had mastered Greek, Latin, and
several
modern languages. He had also translated many classical works, composed
two tragedies and many poems. In his writings, such as 'All'Italia' and
'Sopra il monumento di Dante' Leopardi expressed his love for Italy,
and bewailed her abasement among ruins telling of her past greatness.
"What bruises and what blood! How do I see thee, / Thou loveliest Lady!
Unto Heaven I cry, / And to the world: "Say, say, / What brought her
unto this?" To this and worse / ..." (To Italy).
Saggio sugli errori popolari degli antichi,
written in 1815, but not published until 1846, dealt with
popular mistakes of the Ancients. The Discourse
remained an aborted project for several years. Leopardi sent the first
parts to a Milanese publisher who never replied. During this early creative period Leopardi's health broke down. He developed a cerebrospinal condition that afflicted him all his life. In his hometown he became kind of pariah. Leopardi also had problems with his sight and he eventually became blind in one eye. Its has been claimed that seeing his son's deformity Leopoldi's mother gave thanks to God – suffering is one road to salvation. Though Leopardi's parents were proud of his achievements, they were worried about his liberal views, especially when the secret police took an interst in him. Count Leopardi wrote religious pamphlets and was a reactionary – his son loved liberty. From an early age, Leopardi was encouraged to use his father's large library with its 20 000 volumes, which Conte Monaldo also had placed at the disposal of all Recanatese. Because of his physical deformities, Leopardi found it difficult to associate with women. Moreover, he thought the male sex was more beautiful than the female. His frustrated love for his cousin Gertrude Cassi produced the elegy 'Il primo amore'. She was married, 27-years old, and she stayed in Recanati for only a few days. Terese Fattorini's death from consumption was behind the sad mood of 'A Silvia', written in Pisa in 1828. The poem begins with nostalgic images of youth, happiness, and singing. "I, leaving my fair studies, / Leaving my manuscripts and toil-stained volumes (...) / Leaned sometimes idly from my father's windows / And listened to the music of thy singing (...)" Silvia's death in the Autumn coincides with the disillusionment of the poet. In Zibaldone ("hodge-podge"), containing 4500 pages, Leopardi recorded his thoughts on philosophy, language, art and politics. He kept the diary from July 1817 to December 1832. Recanti, with its 17 churches, became eventually a prison for Leopardi. His correspondence with professor Giordani, a famous scholar, offered some comfort. After reading Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Leopardi captured the "Werther-Fieber", too – he began to contemplate suicide. Goethe depicted a young man who loves his friend's betrothed, and kills himself. In 1822-23 Leopardi lived in Rome. He hated the town, despised the Roman women, and spent his time mostly among Germans. His verse collection Cazoni came out in 1824. In 1825-26 he lived in Bologna and Florence, disliked both of them, and accepted an offer to edit Cicero's works. To earn extra income Leopardi worked as a tutor for a short period. Between the years 1825 and 1828 he wrote for Fortunato Stella publishers Leopardi's writings from the 1820s include Versi (1826) and Operette morali (1827), a disillusioned collection of dialogues after the manner of the Greek satirist Lucian. It was the only major work of prose that Leopardi published in his lifetime. Although Alessandro Manzioni, another great poet of the time, gave it a favorable notice, it was largely ignored by readers. . In 1830 Leopardi left his home in Recanti. He took up residence in Florence and settled then in 1833 in Naples, where he wrote Ginestra (1836). Again he fell hopelessly in love – this time with Fanny, the wife of professor Targioni-Tozzeti. He also began to work on his Pensieri (Thoughts), patterned after the Maximes of the French writer La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). His sarcasm on the fashionable progressive ideas of his fellow writers Leopardi poured into Palinodia. During the last years of his life, Leopardi's close friends included Antonio Ranieri and his sister Paolona Ranieri. To escape the cholera epidemic in Naples, they moved into the villa Ferrigni on the slopes of Vesuvius, about fifteen miles from the city. Leopardi died of pulmonary edema or heart failure on June 14, 1837, in Naples, at the age of thirty-nine. It was rumored that he died of cholera. Ranieri said of his friend: "His whole life was not a career like that of most men; it was truly a precipitate course towards death." According to Ranieri, Leopardi never had physical sexual experiences with women. Many of the representatives of romanticism – Leopardi, Byron, Shelley, Lermontov and so forth – were members of aristocratic families and manifested aristocratic views to some extent, and also were inspired by ideas of freedom. But while Byron had an active public role, Leopardi lived an interior life, and though he expressed feelings of loss and nostalgia for the past, he took in his essay 'Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica' (1818) a critical stand to Romanticism. Moreover, Byron was adored by women but Leopardi's romantic dreams never had fulfillment. He was convinced that ladies laughed at him. Byron created from his feelings of homelessness and loneliness a romantic hero, a mysterious man with a secret in his past. Leopardi could never escape the curse of his own ill health, and later the growing blindness. A poet of despair, suffering became for Leopardi the essence and natural order of nature. Finally it led to the misogyny of the 'Ode on the Likeness of a Beautiful Woman Carven on Her Tomb', written in the winter of 1834-35: "That breast, which visibly / Blanched with beauty him who looked on it – / All these things were, and now / Dust art thou, filth, a fell / And hideous sight hidden beneath a stone." In his "theory of pleasure" Leopoldi argued that "pleasure in its fulfillment does not exist" because it is always in the future. Nietzsche, who was well aware of the poet's thought, said that Leopardi and Schopenhauer were both representatives of a "weak," "decadent," "Romantic" pessimism. In Melville's poem Clarel (1876) Leopardi appeared briefly as a sceptic "stoned by Grief". During the reign of Mussolini, a new interest arose in Leopardi's work. Figures like Leopardi and Petrarch were presented as prophets of Italian national greatness and would-be supporters of the regime. In 1937, a Roman-style triumphal arch, adorned with eagles, lions, fasci, and imperial Roman standards, was erected in Racanti in the main square in Leopardi's honor. It was built in preparation for a visit from Mussolini, who ultimately did not attend the commemoration, but instead decided to name a battleship after Leopardi. His relative Count Ettore Leopardi argued that if he was "the Poet of great human suffering, he was also, powerfully, the Singer of the Fatherland." Leopardi's remains were removed from the church of San Vitale in the Neapolitan neighborhood of Fuorigrotto next to the tomb of Virgil, on the hill between Mergellina and Fuorigotto. For further reading: Leopardi: A Biography by Iris Origo (1935); Poesia e filosofia di Giacomo Leopardi by G. Gentile (1940); L'elaborazione della lirica leopardiana by P. Bigongiari (1948): La filologia di Giacomo Leopardi by S. Timpanaro (1955), Titanismo e pietà in Giacomo Leopardi by U. Bosco (1957); Linguaggio del vero in Leopardi by C. Galimberti (1959); La nuova poetica leopardiana by W. Binni (1962); Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry by G. Singh (1964); Storia del riso leopardiano by G. Marzot (1966); Saggi leopardiani by G. Getto (1966); Frammenti critici leopardiani by A. Monteverdi (1967); Night and the Sublime in Giacomo Leopardi by Nicholas James Perella (1970); A Fragrance from the Desert by Daniela Bibi (1983); Giacomo Leopardi by Gian Piero Barricelli (1986); The Reception of Giacomo Leopardi in the Nineteenth Century: Italy's Greatest Poet after Dante? by Cosetta Veronese; with a foreword by Michael Caesar (2008); Giacomo Leopardi's Search for a Common Life through Poetry: a Different Nobility, a Different Love by Frank Rosengarten (2012); Leopardi and Shelley: Discovery, Translation and Reception by Daniela Cerimonia (2015); Ten Steps: Critical Inquiries on Leopardi, edited by Fabio A. Camilletti and Paola Cori (2015); Flower of the Desert: Giacomo Leopardi's Poetic Ontology by Antonio Negri, translated by Timothy S. Murphy (2015); Forms of Thinking in Leopardi's Zibaldone: Religion, Science and Everyday Life in an Age of Disenchantment by Paola Cori (2019); Le piante di Darwin e i topi di Leopardi by Antonella Anedda (2022) Selected works:
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