45 Facts About Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi's father, Count Monaldo Leopardi, who was fond of literature and a committed reactionary, remained an advocate of traditional ideals.

Giacomo Leopardi became a lifelong friend of Giacomo, who derived from this a sense of hope for the future.

Thereafter relations between father and son continued to deteriorate, and Giacomo Leopardi was constantly monitored by the rest of the family.

Giacomo Leopardi was impressed by the tomb of Torquato Tasso, to whom he felt bound by a common sense of unhappiness.

Giacomo Leopardi had already suffered disillusionment in love at home, with his cousin Geltrude Cassi.

Giacomo Leopardi moved during this period between Milan, Bologna, Florence and Pisa.

In 1827 in Florence, Giacomo Leopardi met Alessandro Manzoni, although they did not see things eye to eye.

Giacomo Leopardi paid a visit to Giordani and met the historian Pietro Colletta.

In 1828, physically infirm and worn out by work, Giacomo Leopardi had refused the offer of a professorship in Bonn or Berlin, made by the Ambassador of Prussia in Rome.

Giacomo Leopardi found kindred company among the liberals and republicans seeking to liberate Italy from its feudal yoke to Austria.

Giacomo Leopardi died during the cholera epidemic of 1837, the immediate cause probably being pulmonary edema or heart failure, due to his fragile physical condition.

Thanks to Antonio Ranieri's intervention with the authorities, Giacomo Leopardi's remains were not buried in a common grave, but in the atrium of the Church of San Vitale at Fuorigrotta.

In 1830, Giacomo Leopardi received a letter from Pietro Colletta, nowadays interpreted as a declaration of masonic brotherhood.

Antiquity, in Giacomo Leopardi's vision, is the infancy of the human species, which sees the personifications of its myths and dreams in the stars.

In 1816 Giacomo Leopardi published Discorso sopra la vita e le opere di Frontone.

Giacomo Leopardi wrote L'appressamento della morte, a poem in terza rima in which the poet experiences death, which he believes to be imminent, as a comfort.

Giacomo Leopardi was acutely aware of the contrast between the interior life of man and his incapacity to manifest it in his relations with others.

Giacomo Leopardi abandoned his philological studies and moved increasingly toward poetry by reading Italian authors of the 14th, 16th and 17th centuries, as well as some of his Italian and French contemporaries.

Giacomo Leopardi translated the second book of the Aeneid and the first book of the Odyssey.

Giacomo Leopardi maintained that "knowing", which is acceptable, is not the same thing as "imitating", which is what Madame de Stael demanded, and that Italian literature should not allow itself to be contaminated by modern forms of literature, but look to the Greek and Latin classics.

Giacomo Leopardi establishes with nature a sort of accord which attenuates the pain and discomfort.

In occasion of the discovery of the De Republica of Cicero on the part of Mai, Giacomo Leopardi wrote the poem Ad Angelo Mai in which he invokes the figures of many Italian poets, from Dante and Petrarch to Torquato Tasso whom he felt so near to himself, to his contemporary Vittorio Alfieri.

Giacomo Leopardi has come to the realization, too late to change things, that everything was done in vain, that everything has been pointless, that he will even die dishonoured and disgraced for his well-intentioned actions.

Giacomo Leopardi's meditations bring him to the conclusion that morality is meaningless; Jove rewards only the selfish and plays arbitrary games with hapless mankind.

In Sappho, Giacomo Leopardi sees himself retarded, but in reality the poet of Lesbos was neither deformed nor unhappy as she is depicted by Giacomo Leopardi, who based his depiction on a false traditional belief.

The anguishing and accusative questions which Giacomo Leopardi poses to a destiny which has denied beauty to the miserable Sappho are cut short by the thought of death.

At this point, a disillusioned Giacomo Leopardi considers abandoning poetry for philosophy, but without any hope of glory.

Between the years 1823 and 1828, Giacomo Leopardi set aside lyric poetry in order to compose his prose magnum opus, Operette morali, which consists of a series of 24 innovative dialogues and fictional essays treating a variety of themes that had already become familiar to his work by then.

In 1828, Giacomo Leopardi returned to lyric poetry with Il Risorgimento.

In 1828, Giacomo Leopardi composed perhaps his most famous poem, A Silvia.

Giacomo Leopardi contemplates the bounty of nature and the world which smiles at him invitingly, but the poet has become misanthropic and disconsolate with the declining of his health and youth and the deprivation of all joy.

Nerina and Silvia are both dreams, evanescent phantasms; life for Giacomo Leopardi is an illusion, the only reality being death.

In 1829, Giacomo Leopardi wrote La quiete dopo la tempesta, in which the light and reassuring verses at the beginning evolve into the dark desperation of the concluding strophe, where pleasure and joy are conceived of as only momentary cessations of suffering and the highest pleasure is provided only by death.

Around the end of 1829 or the first months of 1830, Giacomo Leopardi composed the Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia.

In writing this piece, Giacomo Leopardi drew inspiration from the reading of Voyage d'Orenbourg a Boukhara fait en 1820, by the Russian baron Meyendorff, in which the baron tells of how certain sheep-herders of central Asia belonging to the Kirghiz population practiced a sort of ritual chant consisting of long and sweet strophes directed at the full moon.

In 1831, Giacomo Leopardi wrote Il pensiero dominante, which exalts love as a living or vitalizing force in itself, even when it is unrequited.

Giacomo Leopardi destroys everything, condemns everything, but wishes to save love from the universal miasma and protect it at least within the profundity of his own soul.

Giacomo Leopardi thought that love was one of the few things that makes life worth living but he changed his mind after his beloved Fanny's refusal.

Giacomo Leopardi's heart has beaten all his life but it's time for it to stop beating and staying still.

Giacomo Leopardi just wants to die, to make all the suffering end.

In 1836, while staying near Torre del Greco in a villa on the hillside of Vesuvius, Giacomo Leopardi wrote his moral testament as a poet, La Ginestra, known as Il Fiore del Deserto.

Giacomo Leopardi wrote it between 1831 and 1835, beginning it during his last stay in Florence and finishing it in Naples.

In March 1837, shortly before his death, Giacomo Leopardi announced that he would gather into one volume some "thoughts" on man and society.

The Zibaldone contains the poetic and existential itinerary of Giacomo Leopardi himself; it is a miscellanea of philosophical annotations, schemes, entire compositions, moral reflections, judgements, small idylls, erudite discussions and impressions.

Giacomo Leopardi is entirely imbued and penetrated with it; everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence.