by Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi was born in 1798 in Recanati, a very small town in the isolated, mainly rural region of Marche in central Italy. His father, the extremely conservative Count Monaldo Leopardi, was an amateur writer and scholar who spent most of his time in the family library. The administration of family life was left to Leopardi’s mother, Marquise Adelaide Antici. A strict, unloving, extremely religious woman, she envied parents who lost their children in infancy, since that meant they “had flown safely to paradise, and had freed their parents from the bother of supporting them” (Leopardi, Canti, p. 164).

Lonely and estranged, Leopardi took some comfort in the affection of his siblings Carlo and Paolina. The future poet’s education was formal and extensive; at ten he could read ancient Greek, Arabic, and several other foreign languages. In a seven-year-frenzy of study...