SOURCE: King, Martha, and Daniela Bini. Introduction to Zibaldone: A Selection, translated by Martha King and Daniela Bini, pp. xiii-xxii. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.

In the following essay, King and Bini provide an overview of the composition of Leopardi's multivolume record of his thoughts on poetry and philosophy.

Giacomo Leopardi, the author of this collection of thoughts, this hodge-podge or medley, as the Italian word Zibaldone signifies, was beginning to win renown as a precocious young philologist when the three poets whose names are identical with English romantic poetry took up residence in Italy. In fact, Byron, Shelley, and Keats came to Italy between 1816 and 1820, during the crucial years of Leopardi's intellectual development, the years of his “conversion” [143-144] (Numbers correspond to Leopardi's pagination in the Zibaldone.) to poetry which would eventually make him not only Italy's greatest poet of the Romantic period, but one of the greatest...