TO BE BELOVED – Giacomo Leopardi

Remembered for his intensely pessimistic attitude towards the human condition and life, he was a significant figure of the Italian Romanticism era. The extraordinarily lyrical quality of his poetry, made him a central protagonist in the European and literary and cultural landscape. His own literary evolution, created a remarkable and renowned poetic work, related to the Romantic era. Giacomo Leopardi (an Italian poet, philosopher and philologist), was born in Recanati (Marche, Central Italy), in June 29, 1798. He is widely acknowledged to have been one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century. Although he lived in the ultra-conservative Papal States, he came in touch with the main thoughts of the Enlightenment.

Although he did not attain the fame he deserved in his lifetime, he was later declared the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century. Following a family tradition, he began his studies under the tutelage of priests, but his innate thirst for knowledge found its satisfaction primarily in his father’s rich library. He committed himself so deeply to his studies that – within a short time – he acquired an extraordinary knowledge of classical culture. When he was briefly able to stay in Rome (with his uncle), he was disappointed by the atmosphere of decadence and hypocrisy of the Church. Here, he was impressed by the tomb of Torquato Tasso, (to whom he felt naturally bound by a common sense of unhappiness).

In his early writing years, he worked on translations (translating texts from classical works, such as Horace and sections of the Odyssey. In Florence, he met Alessandro Manzoni. There, he made some solid and lasting friendships, paid a visit to Giordani and met the historian Pietro Colletta. In 1828 (physically infirm and worn out by work), he had to refuse the offer of a professorship (at Bonn or Berlin), which was made by the ambassador of Prussia in Rome and he had to abandon his work and return to Recanati. He moved to Naples (near his friend Antonio Ranieri), where he hoped to benefit physically from the climate. Maybe by pulmonary edema, he died in 1837.

THE INFINITE – Always dear to me was this hill and this hedge, which for much of the last horizon excludes the gaze. But as I sit and gaze, boundless spaces beyond that, and superhuman silences, and deepest quiet, I thought I pretend in; if just for the heart is overwhelmed. And as I hear the wind rustling through the trees I that infinite silence to this entry comparing I go: and I am reminded of the eternal and the dead seasons, and the present and alive, and the sound of it. So in this immensity my thought is drowned: and sweet to shipwreck in this sea.

I HERE WANDERING – I here wandering around the edge, in vain I invoke the rain and storm, so that it deems to my stay. The wind roars in the forest, and rumbles through the clouds wandering thunder, before dawn in the sky was awakened. O dear clouds, or the sky, the earth and plants, she leaves my woman: pity, if it finds mercy in the world an unhappy lover. Or turbines, or wakes you up, or you try to submerge, or clouds, so long as the sun to other lands in the day renewed. Opens the sky, it falls on the breath, in every song posan the herbs and leaves, and dazzles me the lights raw Sole crying pregnant.

TO THE MOON – O lovely moon, I remember that, or turns the year, over this hill I came full of anguish to gaze at you: and you were then suspended on that forest since or do, that all the clearing up. But nebulous and tremulous with tears that I stood on the edge, to my eyes your face will appear open, which was difficult my life: and it is, or changes his style, or my beloved moon. And while it should be a memorial to me, and remember the summer of my pain. Oh how grateful it is necessary in the youth time, even when on the hope and has short memory the course, the remembrance of things past, even that sad, and that the hard wheezing!