We know of his close association with the young Neapolitan patriot Antonio Ranieri, with whom and with whose sister (another Paolina) he lived in Naples from the fall of 1833 until his death, and are curious about the nature of this relationship. But, despite Ranieri’s own late memoir (or perhaps because of its frequent evasions and circumlocutions), we have very little sense of Leopardi’s day-to-day existence in a city that he certainly romanticized in his own mind as closer to nature than, say, cultivated Florence, and then went on to denounce as profoundly reactionary. We are struck by the omnipresence of death in the late, Neapolitan, poems: its image in the figure of its victims in the “sepulchre” poems, Sopra un basso rilievo antico and Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna (“On an Ancient Funeral Relief” and “On the Portrait of a Beautiful Woman,” inspired by contemporary sculptures he had seen in Rome, but probably written in 1834–35); the contest between the “thundering womb” of Vesuvius, with Pompeii buried beneath its solidified, echoing lava flow, and the broom plant that asserts its frail vitality by succumbing gently to its fate (La ginestra, “Broom,” 1836); and the setting of the moon, with which “the world goes colorless, / shadows disappear, and one same darkness / falls on hill and valley. / Night is blind…” (Il tramonto della luna, “The Setting of the Moon,” also 1836, ll. 12–15). We can piece together flurries of literary activity, not least the active plan to publish Leopardi’s Works promoted by the bookseller-printer Saverio Starita, which produced the new edition of the Canti in 1835, but was aborted halfway through the publication of the Operette morali because of objections by the censors. And we sense a Leopardi becoming more inclined to comment, usually obliquely, on contemporary affairs, whether through the mock-heroic ottave of the Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia (1830s) or through the very personalized satire of I nuovi credenti (“The New Believers,” after September 1835), a poem specifically targeted at the Catholic revivalists of Naples, or through hints in the Canti themselves, notably in La ginestra (published posthumously). We seem to be further away from Leopardi in his final years than at any other point in his biography.

Leopardi died in Naples on 14 June 1837, a fortnight before his thirty-ninth birthday. With cholera raging in the city, Ranieri managed to save the body from a common grave and arranged for it to be interred in the church of San Vitale. In 1939 the few remains were transferred to the small park in Piedigrotta (Naples) that is popularly believed to house the tomb of Virgil.

[MC]

Ancients and Moderns

A century and a half after the “querelle des anciens et des modernes,” Leopardi, like Rousseau, takes the side of the ancients and strongly repudiates the myth of progress. If the myth of “progress” is nothing but the secularization of Christian eschatology, as Karl Löwith teaches us in Meaning and History (1949)—that is, the expectation of a future perfection—Leopardi returns to the pagan and archaic idea that perfection is given at the beginning and not at the end of our trajectory (he found confirmation of this in the new research concerning Sanskrit during his own lifetime, and see an entry in the 1827 Index: “The corruption and decay of each genre of poetry usually begins immediately after the first work of that genre,” here p. 2094). But far from relegating the notion of perfection to the spheres of myth or the ultrasensory, Leopardi turns it into a concrete datum that can be experienced, even today, in the minds of children. Leopardi considered the ancients to be closer to nature and to our origins, as they are the “children” of the human race; he thus anticipates the nodal point of reflection that, in the footsteps of Freud, would become central to the developmental epistemology of Piaget and of the Neuchâtel school.

Thus, just as man conserves within him traces of childhood as he grows—Leopardi’s poetry, as that of Wordsworth, consists precisely in the recuperation of this originary imprint—civilization itself, as it gradually expands and develops from the south to the north (Z 4256), leaves in its path regions that live according to other times and to past rhythms: “Antiquity itself and the greater naturalness of the ancients is a kind of southernness in time” (Z 4256). This accounts for Leopardi’s interest in ethnography and in travel literature, which parallels his interest in antiquity. For him, as for Ernst Bloch later, contemporaneity is not uniform, but stratified. And it is above all this stratification that Leopardi investigates, never stopping at the surface level. Rather than being thought of as myths, antiquity and nature (and consequently the south and the Orient which coincide with this condition, see Z 625) constitute more properly speaking one polarity that Leopardi assimilates to the oppositional polarities of modern and ancient civilization, with the aim of creating fields of tension that are infinitely variable according to the discourse and the context. Thus the ancient can exist as an enclave within the modern (the “natives,” the wilderness of the Californias), but there can also be the ancient of the modern (as when one identifies a “Risorgimento,” or revival or rebirth); and a modernity of the ancient (for example Plato or Isocrates) as well as a southernism of the north (such as England, see Z 1850).

Leopardi then inserts into the complexity of this analytic structure the pattern of the natural cycle and the periodic seasonal return, based on an agrarian or astrological imagination (the wheel of Fortune, see Z 2900 and note), as well as an anthropological and historical pattern of progression, according to which the human race, although oscillating between highs and lows in its successive alternations of historical periods, never returns again to the point of departure. In fact, mankind gradually distances itself from nature, and its development assumes a vertiginous acceleration so intense as to render the distance between ancient and modern civilization totally irreversible (Z 163, 4171–72); thus it is impossible to return to the origins “without a miracle” (Z 403). Although Leopardi occasionally utilizes dynamic schemes of a cyclical nature, as do Machiavelli and Vico (Z 403, 867, 3517–18), he clearly distances himself from these earlier thinkers when he underlines the concept of acceleration, which, he maintains, is “of the utmost importance” (Z 1767). And here the door is opened to the “Law of Acceleration” formulated a century later by Henry Adams, and to a critical assessment of modernity that anticipates much of twentieth-century thought. Leopardi never strays from this path, until perhaps the very last years of his life, nor from his desire to intervene actively with the present so as to turn back the hands of the clock of history, in the hope of regenerating a humanity that, by progressing, has lost its original élan (Z 4187).

The keystone of ancient cultures consists above all in the capacity to harbor illusions, and therefore the ability to act in the present. For the ancients (and so too for children and “native peoples”), everything turns on the naive belief in the identity between corporeality and the external world, in the efficacy of action, in the genuineness of expression, because they believed in the objective reality of things: sensations, images, institutions, rituals, and words are real for them, because these apprehensions and practices have not been submitted to the rule of Reason, “the true mother and cause of nothingness” (Z 2942), which destroys the basis of experience. There is no doubt that when Leopardi speaks of the ancients, he is thinking primarily of Greece, or better still, of an archaic Greece, still uncorrupted by Platonic intellectualism. For according to Leopardi, Rome in the first century BCE is already the victim of that excess of civilization and of philosophy that produces the internal barbarism of every people (Z 22, 161, 274), as Brutus and Cicero demonstrate. Such considerations lead to the proposition of a “half-philosophy,” one that might slow down the course of thought (Z 522) and bring humanity back to the threshold that it had crossed after the Platonic turn; back to, that is, a time antecedent to the two fundamental movements of Christianity and of the scientific revolution. These two movements share one essential point: the first exalted the spirit and abstract ideas to the detriment of the body, viewing the phenomenal world as “the enemy of the good” (Z 611–612, anticipating almost to the letter The Gay Science of Nietzsche, § 130), while the second destroyed forever the possibility of believing in a reality underlying the appearance of things.

The ancients would have never located happiness in an invisible world, and they never acted in accordance with rational and universal, or even scientific, principles (they inhabited a “more or less” world, in the words of Alexandre Koyré). Polytheism allowed for a mode of thinking capable of adapting itself to circumstances, morally orienting natural drives rather than seeking to eradicate them, above all in regard to the inclination toward pleasure. The more peoples follow principles that they believe to be universal, the more ruthless and cruel they become (Z 710–11); thus the modern conception of evil, philosophically or ideologically grounded, is “entirely new and more terrible [than the ancient one]” (Z 81); and in the same way, the greater a practical morality, the less a theoretical one (Z 2492–93).