SOURCE: Singh, G. “Giacomo Leopardi: Journey from Illusions to Truth.” In The Motif of the Journey in Nineteenth-Century Italian Literature, edited by Bruno Magliocchetti and Anthony Verna, pp. 53-69. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994.

In the following essay, Singh traces Leopardi's brief journey from a period of youthful and comforting illusions to maturity and the necessity of abandoning those illusions in favor of a pursuit of truth.

Illusions—or what he considered to be such—were to play as important a part in Giacomo Leopardi's childhood and early life as in that of any other person. The crucial difference between him and any other person, however, was the extraordinarily swift and unimpeded transition from illusions, however agreeable and even necessary, to truth, however bitter. His journey from the one to the other could not have been briefer or more decisive. “I fanciulli trovano il tutto nel nulla, gli...