Think of Plato among the ancients, or Foscolo among the moderns. That makes it difficult to know if the voices whose timbre the reader seems to perceive most intensely were ones he had read at first hand—and when and to what extent—or not. Montaigne is one such, and so, above all, are Vico and Rousseau, who are never quoted directly, except in the final years. Of course, it helps to examine the library, for it has remained essentially as it was. His correspondence and the many lists preserved in Naples (the so-called reading lists) provide other precious data. But abundance can be as misleading as absence; Leopardi was more playful and mischievous than is generally thought, and he keeps his most important cards covered; he likes to play as much as to converse, to conceal as much as to display, and often both at the same time. It’s surprising to find passages of Voltaire or Plato, of crucial importance in his thinking, cited only for a linguistic detail (Z 4177, 4273, 4298–99). But one can’t help admiring the ironic nonchalance of that modesty.

The many quotations are, however, only a small part of the text, in which, day by day, what has been called, felicitously, “thought in movement” takes shape. The truth is that the library only minimally explains the Zibaldone, which is not simply the place where he assembles, and discusses, tradition but also, on the contrary, the place where a radically new thought is advanced, a new, modern subject in search of itself.

The impact that the Zibaldone had on readers of the twentieth century (and, we hope, of the centuries to come) is due precisely to this deviation from a known horizon. Such readers are also the only ones who could and did read it, because the manuscript remained unpublished—by a strange fate that was perhaps not blind—until 1898, becoming, not without reason, a contemporary of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887), Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and The Education of Henry Adams (1907). The Zibaldone is a text of astonishing modernity, which interrogates the future, like the letter that Leopardi would have liked to write “to a young man of the twentieth century” (Z 4280). His status as an amateur, his isolation and belatedness with regard to both the Enlightenment and German idealism and to Romanticism, the mastery of six or seven languages, ancient and modern, the very long perspective that gave him an infinite knowledge of the classical sources, the unresolved conflict between religiosity and rationality, between a methodical spirit and an acute sensibility with ascetic and almost mystical features: all these elements, mixed with genius, allowed Leopardi to speak to posterity, to become an unclassifiable “solitary philosopher” (as he described himself), unique on the European scene.

When he began to take the notes that became the Zibaldone, the extremely erudite, melancholy, and provincial nineteen-year-old had all the requirements necessary to become the morally inert scholar whom Nietzsche depicts in the second of the Untimely Meditations, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874). But instead this extraordinary text, which, not coincidentally, opens in the name of Leopardi, and with an image taken from the “Canto notturno,” gives us the key to understanding the unprecedented novelty of the Zibaldone. Leopardi turns to the past to get from it his building materials, to nourish a lively, original, powerful mind. Nothing is more alien to him than impassive, static scientific or scholarly reconstruction; his archaeology is critical and dynamic, courageous and passionate (one might say heroic). His investigations, which at times seem like those of a detective, and his close arguments are a challenge, a constant effort to understand the complexity and dynamism of the world without succumbing to the sirens of logic and history (and its dominant tendencies). It’s too bad that another “genealogist,” Michel Foucault, didn’t come across his work, but the same could be said of many thinkers and writers who have been prevented from knowing him by the dearth of translations.

The prose of the Zibaldone—dense but clear, elegant but simple, and familiar as Italian prose never had been, and never would be again—is always taut, interrogative even when it is affirmative. The Zibaldone is a field of hidden tensions that the reader is urged and almost obliged to uncover and interpret: horizontal tensions, between contiguous thoughts, which appear to confront different problems but in fact respond to the same question; vertical tensions, between different fields, which share structures, themes, images, forms of thought; chronological tensions, evident if one follows a thought in its development through the years; and, finally, tensions between external and internal, that is, between the fragments of quoted texts and the way in which they are rewritten in Leopardi’s text. Often these tensions are manifested in apparent contradictions that Leopardi refuses to resolve, and which he uses as tools for pursuing continuous variations, even when the subject might seem closed once and for all. As an obvious comparison, we might think of the Essais of Montaigne, but we should remember that because Leopardi is situated at the end, and not the beginning, of the pathway of modernity he is permitted a radicalness of questions that finds a precise correspondence in a structure of thought that is much more discontinuous, dramatic, and problematic, giving up the free but completed course of the essai and entrusted for the most part to private writing: as though by now too much skepticism surrounded even the possibility of addressing a public in which Leopardi—sharing, without knowing it, the intuitions of Goethe’s Faust and prefiguring the analyses of Tocqueville—no longer had any faith (Z 4271, 4346–47, 4367, 4471).

Unlike the Essais, in short, the Zibaldone is not a work, but has, in a certain sense, become one and continues to become one as the cultural conditions that it foresaw come into existence. It is continuous and linear, but is not directed in any teleological sense: each thought stands on its own, it always begins again, with a slight indentation at the beginning of the first line, and nearly always concludes with a date. The typical form of the diary, then, but one that Leopardi bends to almost exclusively intellectual use, seldom if ever speaking directly about himself, except in a general perspective (as indeed does Henry Adams in his autobiography). The multifaceted and supple solution that he adopts, one that is perhaps unique, is a forerunner of so much fragmentary philosophical writing, with its intolerance of systematic philosophical forms, from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, from Benjamin to Valéry to Simone Weil. One might think of the thousands of “etc.”s that are scattered through the text and force the coherence of the argument in the direction of the “vague” and the mystery of what is not said. The difference is that—in a further contradiction—Leopardi finds this form while constantly searching for the unity of the system, in which he is similar to Pascal, a thinker with whom he is profoundly in harmony in many other respects, or with the Novalis of the Allgemeine Brouillon, whom he did not know at all.

But perhaps the Zibaldone can best be defined as a hypertext, with the added dimension of time. It has already been said that Leopardi made use of a network of movable slips that function as points of intersection. Further, the single thoughts often refer to preceding ones, or in fact take off from these, like buds springing from the discourse, with the retrospective formula “For p.…” This system is reinforced, over the years, by continuous rereadings of the manuscript, which make use of, in certain phases, the draft of indexes, two partial ones going back to the early 1820s (not reproduced in this edition), and the last, the most imposing and nearly complete, realized in 1827 on the basis of slips of paper. Again the text is produced in a hermeneutic circuit of reading and writing, but this time it is not in the relationship between the quotation from someone else and the comment of the author but rather within the same subject-author, who coincides only in part with his past self, because he has been modified by the passage of time.

If one looks at the Naples manuscript (now available both in print and on CD-ROM), a contrast leaps to one’s eyes: the original page, which is usually very clean, with regular, easily legible handwriting, as if it were printed, has been altered by accretions of material that have accumulated between the lines and in the margins; the words take on almost fantastic shapes as they fill the available spaces, in handwriting that varies over time, as does the color of the ink and the form of the pen strokes: a slow crystallization of corrections, additions, clarifications, marked by time. And constant references ahead to later thoughts, not yet written at the moment the page was drafted: “See p.…” A printed edition can render this stratification only in a synchronous way, but readers should know—and remember as they read—that under the two-dimensional surface of the page lies a reticular structure buried in time. The Zibaldone, from this point of view, takes on the contours of an autobiography, or an intellectual archaeological dig, and represents in its own distinctive ways the modern—yet still Augustinian—temporal abyss explored by the great Romantic autobiographies, starting with Wordsworth.

The project is the progressive polarity of this text in continuous tension (like pleasure) between past and future.