Leopardi pays homage to Dante. What sounds like an extraordinary literary combination, extremely suggestive, will become reality at Casa Leopardi, the building in Recanati that housed little Giacomo and from which he drew the thirst for knowledge and a rigid and austere education. In the historic residence, now converted into a museum, the autographed manuscript of the song that Leopardi dedicated to the Supreme Poet will be exhibited to the public for the first time. Above the monument of Dante that was being prepared in Florence, together with some precious editions of the Comedy.
Detail of the original manuscript
(ansa)
In the work, the Recanatese turns to the workers in charge of creating the monument, before addressing himself to Dante himself, to whom the poet shows the state in which Italy is currently found, prey to foreign powers who rob it, bringing statues across the Alps, paintings, books.
The Divine Comedy was the subject of the studies of Giacomo, his brothers and his father Monaldo. The poet from Recanati was a passionate reader and a profound connoisseur of the Florentine author: «… Why is Dante’s style the strongest that can ever be conceived, and for this part the most beautiful and delightful possible? Because every word with him is an image », wrote Leopardi in his Zibaldone.
“For our family it is a great pleasure to be able to give the public the opportunity to enjoy the treasures present in the library that saw Giacomo’s formation”, said Countess Olimpia Leopardi, descendant of the Poet. «We would like to offer visitors the opportunity to step into the shoes of the young reader and try to rediscover his boyish amazement, the one that captures all of us in front of a work that has shaped the collective imagination. In Dante Giacomo sees that ideal of poet and writer who founds the Italian language, but he cannot identify himself fully with him, he cannot consider him a putative father, their sensibilities as men and poets too different. When visiting Ravenna, at the tomb of the great Alighieri, Giacomo confesses that he did not feel emotion, that he did not cry. Which instead happened to him on that of Tasso where, he writes, he felt “the pleasure of tears”. And this is because he felt Tasso’s fragility closer to his soul than Dante’s strength. Dante is a strong subject for whom Leopardi feels above all a feeling of admiration, but he does not identify with him, as happens with others. “
The figure of Alighieri is so important that it is cited several times in Leopardi’s writings and inspired one of his early songs. The exhibition, set up in the manuscripts room of the Leopardi Library, can be visited from Friday 29 October until 30 January 2022.