SOURCE: Brose, Margaret. “Moontime and Memory: Leopardi's ‘Alla luna’.” Stanford Italian Review 9, Nos. 1-2 (1990): 155-79.

In the following essay, Brose offers a detailed stylistic analysis of “Alla luna,” viewing it as a work concerned principally with the act of remembering, and comparing the poem with others in Leopardi's oeuvre.

Giacomo Leopardi's “Alla luna,” written most probably in July of 1819, is the second composition of the group of poems known as the primi or piccoli idilli: a group of five poems written between 1819 and 1821, which are united by their shared setting of the Recanati landscape, and suffused with a nostalgia for the loss of innocence. The term idillio comes from Leopardi's own description of those poems of 1819, which he further defines as “situazioni affezzioni avventure storiche del mio animo.”¹ As is well known, Leopardi's idyllic voice was born contemporaneously with another poetic register, that of his first political and...