Biography
Giacomo Leopardi was born from a local noble family in Recanati, in the Marche, at the time ruled by the papacy. At home, a rigorous discipline of religion and savings reigned.
Leopardi, following a family tradition, began his studies under the tutelage of two priests, but his innate thirst for knowledge found its satisfaction primarily in his father's rich library. He committed himself so deeply to his "mad and most desperate" studies that, within a short time, he acquired an extraordinary knowledge of classical and philological culture—he could fluently read and write Latin, Greek and even Hebrew—.
Between the ages of twelve and nineteen, he studied constantly. His continuous study undermined an already fragile physical constitution, and his illness, denied him youth's simplest pleasures.
He considered Recanati as a rigid and closed town and he travelled to Rome, Milan and Florence.
Later, he moved to Naples, where he hoped to benefit physically from the climate. He died during the cholera epidemic of 1837.
L'infinito
Original Text
Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quiete
io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco
il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
infinito silenzio a questa voce
vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,
e le morte stagioni, e la presente
e viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
immensità s’annega il pensier mio:
e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.
English Translation
Always dear to me was this solitary hill
and this hedge, which, from so many parts
of the far horizon, the sight excludes.
But sitting and gazing endless
spaces beyond it, and inhuman
silences, and the deepest quiet,
I fake myself in my thoughts; where almost
my heart scares. As the wind
I hear rustling through these trees, I, that
infinite silence, to this voice
keep comparing: and I feel the eternal,
the dead seasons, the present,
and living one, and the sound of her. So in this
immensity drown my own thoughts:
and sinking in this sea is sweet to me.
The highest expression of poetry is reached in Leopardi in L'Infinito, which is at once philosophy and art, since in the brief harmony of the verses are concentrated the conclusions of long philosophical meditations. The theme is a concept, which mind can only with extreme difficulty conceive. The poet narrates an experience he often has when he sits in a secluded place on a hill. His eyes cannot reach the horizon, because of a hedge surrounding the site; his thought, instead, is able to imagine spaces without limits. "Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle; E questa siepe che da tanta parte; Dell'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude". Another interpretation suggests that this hill represents the heights human thought achieves, but at the top there is an hedge that prevents one from seeing the ultimate horizon, beyond death and existence. The silence is deep; when a breath of wind comes, this voice sounds like the voice of present time, and by contrast it evokes all times past, and eternity. Thus, the poet's thought is overwhelmed by new and unknown suggestions, but "il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare" ("shipwreck / seems sweet to me in this sea." ).
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