SOURCE: Caserta, Ernesto G. “Leopardi's Paralipomeni.” Italian Quarterly 17, no. 66 (Fall-Winter 1973): 3-23.

In the following essay, Caserta analyzes Leopardi's political satire Paralipomeni, seeing it as critique of the Italian Risorgimento and a polemical description of “the miserable destiny of the whole of mankind blindly in search of an illusory progress.”

The Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia is Giacomo Leopardi's longest poem. Composed after the Canti and the Operette morali, between 1830 and 1837, and for the most part during his residence in Naples, the work was first published in Paris in 1842, but until recent years it has enjoyed little favor among scholars due to various prejudices both moral and aesthetic. Most of the opinions expressed about the poem during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth are, in fact, based on reservations of a political and pedagogical nature. They often reflect the indignation of patriotic scholars...