But the impulse to write what might otherwise have remained one of the many projects that Leopardi left unrealized in the bottom drawer came more probably from his encounter in Rome with a very different writer of dialogues, Plato, and from Leopardi’s subsequent wrestling with, and against, Platonic thought in the high-octane pages of the Zibaldone composed in the summer and autumn of 1823. It was in the Operette that the principal themes worked out in the notebooks over the previous four years, and the new perspectives that he had focalized in the preceding months, would find a suitable “fictional” form, a form in which they could be presented to the public not as dry philosophy, not as a scientific discourse freighted with technicalities and specialist language, but as trains of thought that were approachable and even entertaining, sometimes humorous, in the form of dialogues or fables. There was nothing simplistic, however, about either the ideas or the language in which they were expressed; the language, utterly different from the sort of populist idiom commonly used in early nineteenth-century dialogues, was precise, taut, and syntactically complex—very like that of the Zibaldone, in fact. Like the poems, Leopardi’s prose demanded attention from its reader. In both cases, the author played a risky game. His desire to communicate was (and remained) extremely strong: the repeated initiatives he took to have his work published, the concern with which he followed the stages of publication, his anxiety about the reception of his work were enough to show that Leopardi was no literary recluse. On the other hand, what he wanted to communicate was exactly what he wanted to say (he was aware, too, that how the work appeared affected the communication of its message). On this basis of amicable intransigence Leopardi could hope to engage with his readers on such topics as the futility of the present, the unimportance of human beings in the natural order of things, the impossibility of achieving pleasure, the indifference or hostility of nature to all things human, the supremacy of death over life, the phenomenology of noia, the illusoriness of literary or any other kind of fame, and above all the right of the writer to say things that go against the grain of public opinion or common sense (but which are true). His hopes were not fulfilled: the Operette, like the canzoni before them, were perceived as “difficult.” On 1 August 1827, Stella, his publisher, wrote to the author diplomatically: “I hear your Operette morali spoken well of by everybody, even though Italy is not yet accustomed to that kind of reading matter.” Publication, essential to Leopardi’s sense of himself as a writer, brought with it its inevitable baggage of incomprehension, misunderstanding, distortion, and downright hostility. Perhaps it was no accident that the years in which Leopardi had made his greatest effort toward the public (1824–27) merged quite rapidly into a period of radical withdrawal, one in which he described himself, using the English word, as “absent,” before he began to find a way back again in the later twenties. It is no accident that during these voided years Leopardi devoted himself to the translation of Greek prose writers, notably the Stoically inspired Handbook of Epictetus (1825).

In the summer of 1827, in Florence, Leopardi started the gargantuan task of indexing his Zibaldone, completing it three months later, as he triumphantly announced on 14 October (Z 4295). Not only was he trying to put some order into his unwieldy manuscript, he was of course doing it for a purpose, to see if he could extract from it ideas for future books. Some of the separate files he devised during the same period indicate the kind of scholarly and moral topics that he had in mind (see pp. 2103–10 of this edition). He also began accumulating material for a book of aphorisms that would be published posthumously as Pensieri. In the spring of 1828, now in Pisa, he wrote to his sister, Paolina, that he had started writing poetry again, “in the old way.” The first two poems in this new phase of creativity, apart from the short Scherzo written in February, were both composed in Pisa in April 1828. Il risorgimento (“The Reawakening,” with no political connotations) was written in a style unusual for Leopardi, that of the Arcadian canzonetta, which allowed him to combine a tripping musicality with a measured artifice, as though he were keeping his newly rediscovered feelings at a distance by imposing on himself an external constraint: not dissimilar in kind, if very different in scale, to the systematization of his thoughts through the medium of an index. The poem opens the way to A Silvia (“To Silvia”), the first of a series of stunningly original lyrics that will be composed over the next two years. Before leaving Tuscany, Leopardi spent another summer in the famous reading room established by Giampietro Vieusseux in Palazzo Buondelmonti in Florence, this time making exhaustive notes in the Zibaldone on oral and popular poetic traditions from Homer to contemporary repertoires from Iceland, the Faroes, or the Slav countries and the nations of central Asia (Z 4311ff.). Dry as these compilations from the periodicals of the day may seem, it is difficult not to sense the subterranean connections between them and his own new poetry in the old style, the poems written between 1828 and 1830 (mostly in Recanati on what will be his last return to his hometown), poems such as Le ricordanze (“The Recollections”) and, above all, Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia (“Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia”), that will achieve an unparalleled simplicity of diction combined with exactness of thought and feeling.

As already observed, the writing of the Zibaldone takes place almost entirely in Recanati. And in 1832, after a few desultory pages, it stops. Leopardi keeps it by him, for the rest of his life, and it will remain in the possession of his companion Antonio Ranieri until the latter’s death in 1888. Strangely, the reader of Leopardi suddenly feels bereft. After being accustomed to the luxury of a poetic word (whether in verse or in prose) that is embedded in a tangible, documentable, reproducible humus of reflection and thought, he or she has now to confront the great last poems of the 1830s without such comforts. Of course, that was the situation of all readers of Leopardi before the Zibaldone came to light on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth. The Zibaldone was a private document, not intended for public consumption, except to the extent that its author wished it to be, in duly altered form. But it is now impossible for any serious reader of Leopardi to do without it. And it is perhaps for this reason, at least in part, that the figure of Leopardi, in the final years of his life, seems more elusive to our grasp. From a biographical point of view, his letters fill part of the gap. We know of his hopeless infatuation for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti in Florence in the early 1830s, and the “Aspasia” cycle of poems of illusion and disillusionment that were supposedly occasioned by it.