As long as the Zibaldone loses its original function, it tends to become also a laboratory for other works. The partial indexes of the early 1820s are useful for the draft of the first twenty Operette morali of 1824; in the last years many notes, of the aphoristic type, are preparatory sketches for the future book of Pensieri, or a revision of the youthful Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients (Z 4477). The great workshop for these projects is the index of 1827, to which Leopardi, who, in Bologna in 1826, had read Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (and perhaps also the Dictionnaire of Bayle), devoted himself, with the idea of reusing the limitless materials of the Zibaldone. Between 1827 and 1829 some notes are preceded by a title that refers to entries in the index or to the “separate slips not referred to in the 1827 Index”: “Moral etiquette,” “Humanity of the ancients,” “Social Machiavellianism,” “Manual of practical philosophy.” As for other works, only titles remain, in the files preserved in Naples: “Encyclopedic dictionary of literature,” “Encyclopedia of chitchat,” “Encyclopedia of useless knowledge and things that aren’t known, or Supplement to all encyclopedias.” A comparison with the virtual meta-encyclopedias that are available today would not be far-fetched, evoking a future scenario whose danger Leopardi, anticipating Flaubert, was aware of: the connection between the broadening of knowledge and its impoverishment. The heir of eighteenth-century encyclopedism, and since childhood considered “super-encyclopedic” (Z 273: “They thought I was a poet, rhetorician, physicist, politician, doctor, theologian, etc., in short, super-encyclopedic”), he understood that opening up thought to an infinite world would explode the linear orientation of discourse, the traditional categories of genre, and bring about the overcoming of typographical two-dimensionality, leading toward netlike structures in continuous evolution. “When a writer intends to produce a book, it is all the more necessary,” he wrote when the Zibaldone was near its end, “that he must know how to limit himself, that he take diligent care to circumscribe the argument, both in the minds of readers and especially in his own intention, and that he impose on himself an obligation not to exceed the terms established” (Z 4484, 6 April 1829).

But he was the first not to heed this reminder not to go beyond the limits. As early as 1819 he founded modern Italian poetry on the rush of thought beyond the hedge that “cuts off the view.” The journey of the Zibaldone was doomed to failure from the start: a failure that was, however, transformed, in the modern manner, into energy, making the failed work a continuous prelude, a book of the future.

[FD]

Giacomo Leopardi: A Short Biography

Giacomo Leopardi was born on 29 June 1798, the first son of Count Monaldo Leopardi and the Marchioness Adelaide Antici. A brother (Carlo) and a sister (Paolina) were born soon after, and the three children were to become close companions during their childhood and adolescence. Both parents were scions of established land-owning aristocratic families in the hill town of Recanati southwest of Ancona, in what is now the Marche region; at the time it was one of the most conservative corners of the Papal States. Monaldo—a self-conscious survivor of the ancien regime who until his dying day dressed in black and wore the side-sword that was the symbol of his caste—had come into his inheritance early, but spent recklessly, made bad business decisions, and by the time of his marriage had mortgaged most of his property. In 1803, the day-to-day running of the estate was taken over by the iron-willed Adelaide, who kept up aristocratic appearances but maintained strict control of the rest of the family’s expenditure. These straitened circumstances persisted throughout Giacomo’s life, until all the debts were finally paid off, in 1842, five years after his death.

Giacomo, Carlo, and Paolina were educated together at home by private tutors, following courses of study with annual exams that were held first in the presence of the family, and later before a wider public. Monaldo, who had intellectual ambitions of his own, was the presiding genius of the schoolroom. His plan for Giacomo was to produce the perfect Catholic gentleman, enjoying all the privileges of a rentier existence, whose ambition ideally would be centered on the imposing Palazzo Leopardi and its rightful place in the society of Recanati, and whose intellectual world, shaped by Jesuit principles of instruction, would harness the forces of logic and reason (and their ordained language, Latin) to the service of the true faith. It was an education that encouraged both prodigious amounts of rote learning (especially in the early years) and, later, in the “philosophy class” of 1810–12, fine honing of the competitive skills of argument and rebuttal: acquired resources that would serve Leopardi magnificently in later years.

Already before he entered his teens, it was evident that the young Leopardi was exceptionally able. His hunger for reading and knowledge was fed by the rich library that his father had first begun to enlarge in the 1790s, and that, by the time Monaldo opened it (in principle) to the citizens of Recanati in 1812, had grown to more than ten thousand volumes, many of them acquired from the forced sale of convent libraries; it still exists today, virtually intact. It was here, with his father across the table, that Leopardi, having completed his formal education at the age of fourteen, first taught himself Greek, and subsequently Hebrew, began to translate and to produce volumes of philological commentary for publication (whether in limited scribal form or, from 1816, in printed editions), and embarked on autonomous volumes of erudition, a History of Astronomy in 1813, and the Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients (1815), which is both a compilation and a repository—for future memory—of classical myth and fable. Later, in the Zibaldone, he will recall these years as the happiest time of his life: “quietly occupied in my studies with nothing else to disturb me, and with the calm and certain hope of a happy future,” of a kind that can only occur “in a youth of that age, or at least, of that experience” (Z 76, L’s emphasis).

The idyll could not last. His emulation of his bookish father, his desire to please and impress him in every respect, soon risked becoming a competition between them, one that, psychologically, neither of them could win. His hunger for love, unassuaged by his mother’s rigid devotion to duty above affection (mercilessly portrayed in a celebrated passage of the Zibaldone: Z 353–56), was met by a father’s love no less conditional than it was sincere: there was no room in it for the son’s real autonomy. Yet that autonomy was asserting itself. The already respected philologist began to become a poet in his eighteenth year, and it was in poetry initially that he could tentatively explore, and to some extent exorcise, undefined but fearful feelings of unhappiness and despair (the theme of early death is first adumbrated in the canticle Appressamento della morte, composed in late 1816). In 1817 he confided his first, infrequent, thoughts to another “secret” document, which was to become the Zibaldone. At the end of that year, a visit to Recanati by his beautiful cousin Geltrude Cassi Lazzari, a prototype of imposing, although idealized, womanhood that would haunt his writings, provoked a surgical self-analysis in prose and the first, self-conscious, poem to be admitted years later to the canon of his published verse, under the title Il primo amore (“First Love”).

During these years of late adolescence and early adulthood, Giacomo made increasingly confident approaches to the outside world of literature as well as that of scholarship. Between June 1816 and November 1817, his name appeared seven times in the Milanese journal Lo Spettatore as the author of essays, translations, and a series of satirical poems. Its editor and publisher, A. F. Stella, who would provide Giacomo with some soul-destroying but necessary literary work in the 1820s as well as publishing his Operette morali (see below), was also the indirect link to the most important friendship Leopardi made in these years, that with the Piacenza man of letters Pietro Giordani, one of the most celebrated literati of the day, who unexpectedly responded to a round-robin letter Leopardi had sent on the occasion of the publication in the Spettatore of his translation of book II of the Aeneid. Deeply affected by Giordani’s critical appreciation of his work and by the older man’s generous empathy toward a cultural nobody twenty-five years his junior, Leopardi opened his heart in an intensely emotional epistolary exchange with Giordani starting in March 1817, in which he insisted on the provincialism of Recanati and what he himself called his “immoderate desire for glory,” but also gave worrying signs of his fragile health and growing unhappiness. Neither Giordani nor Stella could (or would) help with getting Leopardi’s major literary-theoretical essay Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry, written in early 1818, into print.