Conte Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), Italy's greatest romantic poet, had encyclopedic interests. His critical writings, correspondence, philological studies, and notebooks of literary and philosophical reflections supplement his poetry.

Born in stifling, provincial Recanati on June 29, 1798, Giacomo Leopardi devoted his precocious adolescence entirely to learning. His cold, stern mother, Adelaide, concerned only with restoring the family's finances and maintaining a noble facade, neglected the emotional needs of her children. Conte Monaldo, his conservative and impoverished father, for a time sheltered Giacomo from the ideas of the Enlightenment, channeling his attention toward religious and philological studies. These intense years of study produced A History of Astronomy (1814), An Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients (1815), and Julius Africanus (1815), but delicate health soon became a major source of personal suffering, limiting his capacity for sustained work.

Beginning in 1816 Leopardi's early antiquarianism and religiosity ceded to a developing interest in literature. While some...