12 Facts About Pietro Giordani

Pietro Giordani was an Italian writer, classical literary scholar, a Freemason of the Grand Orient of Italy and a close friend of, and influence on, Giacomo Leopardi.

Pietro Giordani looked with extreme favor upon Napoleon Bonaparte and the Napoleonic regime in Italy and, in 1807, he wrote a Panegyric on the Sacred Majesty of Napoleon.

Pietro Giordani continued visiting him frequently during the following years.

Pietro Giordani encouraged and helped foster the intellectual development and the further acquisition of knowledge that led to Leopardi's eventual greatness by exposing him to different cultural environments which included the most important groups of writers and intellectuals of the times.

In February 1817, Giacomo Leopardi sent three copies of his own personal translation of the Virgilian Aeneid to Angelo Mai, Vincenzo Monti and Pietro Giordani, the leading exponents of Italian classicism.

Pietro Giordani encouraged and fostered the Recanatese's acquaintance in cultural circles, and the two had great esteem and affection for each other: the young poet called him "dear and good fatherly image".

Pietro Giordani traveled a great deal and settled, at various times, in Piacenza, Bologna and, finally, in Milan, where he became an editor, along with Vincenzo Monti, Giuseppe Acerbi and the geologist Scipione Breislak, of the classicist magazine La Biblioteca Italiana.

Pietro Giordani felt compelled to leave this position because of an increasing atmosphere of political conflict and antagonism with Giuseppe Acerbi who held firmly Austro-Hungarian sympathies.

Pietro Giordani rejected this vision of a market of letters, preferring to stick to his lofty Aristotelean conception of the contemplative and austere poet.

On 1 January 1816, in the first issue of "La Biblioteca Italiana", Pietro Giordani published his own translation of an article of Madame de Stael with the title On the Manner and Utility of Translations, in which de Stael invited Italians to abandon the isolationism and provincialism of their native literary traditions, to abandon their continued reference to a worn and anachronistic mythology in order to move closer to modern foreign literature.

Perfection, for Pietro Giordani, was reached by the Greek and Latin writers and, later, by the Italians.

Pietro Giordani admitted that there are many tastes, but believed that these tastes are all conformable to the different characters of the various populations and cultures of the world.