A discovery that will make your head spin. A young manuscript, unpublished, by a just sixteen year old Leopardi, but who already reveals in himself – both in the handwriting and in the depth of the literary gaze – the DNA of the sublime poet of the Infinite. The rediscovered “notebook” consists of four half sheets, folded in the middle so as to obtain eight sides, each bearing a long and dense alphabetical list of ancient and late ancient authors (about 160 lemmas), each of which followed by a series of numerical references (over 550 overall).
An exceptional novel
Here it is the unpublished work intercepted in the Leopardian collection, kept at the National Library of Naples, by Marcello Andria and Paola Zito who edited it for the types of Le Monnier University. The volume, entitled Leopardi and Giuliano emperor. An unpublished note from the Neapolitan papers it will be presented in Naples at the National Library – Sala Rari – tomorrow Tuesday 3 May (4 pm) with the interventions of Maria Iannotti, Giulio Sodano, Francesco Piro, Rosa Giulio, Silvio Perrella, Lucia Annicelli.
“The unpublished confirms the importance of the Neapolitan Leopardi collection which is increasingly complete, providing scholars with an integral panorama of the work of Giacomo Leopardi – reads a note – We are facing a writing by Leopardi just sixteen years old , a regular visitor to his father’s library, who made an accurate and detailed examination of the Opera omnia by Giuliano emperor, using the authoritative edition of Ezechiel Spanheim, which appeared in Leipzig in 1696 ».
The adventure in the paternal library
“Leopardi, who only the year before began to study Greek as a self-taught man, assiduously searches the best specimens of his father’s library, the autograph shows us how, although very young, Leopardi is already an educated and curious scholar and already has an accurate working method , which will represent the constant feature of Leopardi’s path – he explains – The years in which the young Leopardi approaches to reading Giuliano represent a significant stage in the path of re-evaluation of the figure of the Apostate, for a long time overshadowed by the almost unanimous condemnation of historians dating back to the mid-sixteenth century and rediscovered in the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment mainly (Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire) but welcomed in Italy, amidst attestations of esteem and declared hostility “.