Part One: Nobility—A Family Legacy and a Lingering Ideal

There are several paintings and an engraving [1] of Giacomo Leopardi that are said to be trustworthy likenesses. But a verbal portrait of him captures perhaps better certain traits that one might easily associate with an intensely studious man who was born and known throughout his life as Count Giacomo Leopardi.[2]

He was of average height, bent and frail, of a pallid not to say sallow complexion. His head was large, his forehead square and broad, his eyes blue and languid, his nose acquiline and his features extremely delicate. He spoke in subdued tones, almost in a whisper, and his smile was indescribable, one might almost call it divine.[3]

This cameo sketch was written by Antonio Ranieri long after Leopardi’s death. But having lived with the poet during the last seven years of his life, his memory of him remained poignant and vivid until his own passing in 1888. One of the things that Ranieri admired in Leopardi was his modesty and his refusal to accord any special importance to his noble birth. He wanted to be known for his intellectual and creative qualities, not his blood line.

Yet Leopardi had an ambivalent attitude toward his aristocratic lineage. Although increasingly critical of his social class, he accepted his title and the privileges that went along with it, even though privilege entailed some burdensome responsibilities. This can be intuited from his full baptismal name, which was recorded on his birth certificate, not in Italian but in Latin: Iacobus Taldegardus Francescus Sales Xaverius Petrus Leopardi.[4] These names signified the secular and the religious traditions which both of his parents deemed to be essential to their own and to their son’s proper role in life. Iacobus (Giacomo) was the first name of his paternal grandfather; Taldegardus was the name of a medieval forebear; Francescus Sales recalled Saint Francis de Sales (1567–1622), who was at once a nobleman and a scholar whose education had been entrusted to the Society of Jesus, the Catholic Order that was most esteemed by Giacomo’s father, Monaldo; Xaverius probably referred to St. Francis Xaveri (1506–1552), co-founder of the Jesuit Order; and Petrus was a reminder of Christ’s most important disciple, the Saint whose life and death constituted the “rock” on which the Catholic Church established its worldly as well as its spiritual authority.

There was another rock, a quintessentially secular and material one of great symbolic value, on which the fortunes of the gens Leoparda were based. It was their massive four-floor, thirty-room seventeenth-century dwelling known popularly as “the palazzo of the Counts” situated in a section of the provincial hillside town of Recanati called Monte Morello. As one historian puts it, “the building’s rather somber architectural style and marble entrance hall showed the need for privacy and privilege, isolated from the outside life of the town,”[5] which had a population of about 15,000 people at the turn of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Monaldo made sure that he and his family were on good terms with the townspeople, and especially with the fourteen families[6] who worked as sharecroppers on his landed property in the nearby agricultural village of San Leopardo. Some of Giacomo’s most vivid childhood memories were of this peasant society, whose labor made his life of the mind possible.

The Leopardis were one of about thirty aristocratic families in Recanati, most of whom had a full complement of footmen, cooks and maids, gardeners, and coachmen. Another aspect of their domestic life that they shared with other noble families was a retinue of at least three teachers and tutors who supplemented the instruction given to the Leopardi children by their two primary teachers, don Giuseppe Torres and don Sebastiano Sanchini. They were a canon regular named Borne, who taught French; an occasional assistant teacher called a pedante named don Vincenzo Diotallevi; and a chaplain, don Vincenzo Ferri, who conducted religious services in the family chapel.

Monaldo had a special place in his heart for the Jesuit order. His own early education had been entrusted to a Mexican Jesuit priest, don Giuseppe Torres, who lived in the Leopardi residence for thirty-seven years, from the beginning of his tutorial duties in 1784, when Monaldo became his pupil, until his death in 1821. Although Monaldo did not approve of Torres’s reliance on memorization and endless repetition as a way of imparting knowledge, when the time came to select a teacher for Giacomo and his siblings, he retained father Torres, for whom he had much affection.

For Count Monaldo (1776–1847) and his wife, Marquise Adelaide Antici (1779–1857), who also came from a noble family of great antiquity, teachers and names were not to be casually chosen; they embodied qualities that the family held to be indispensable to any right-thinking member of their clan. In these and other ways, the Leopardi and the Antici families, like their counterparts elsewhere in the Papal States, tried to make sure that their progeny would follow in their footsteps as defenders of their dynastic interests and as paladins of papal and royal authority. Adelaide’s chief counsel in this domain, apart from her husband, was her brother Marquis Carlo Antici (1772–1849), who also strove to shape his nephew’s life in accordance with strict criteria of political and religious conservatism. He was encouraged by the boy’s exceptionally intense religious ardor, as exemplified by a composition, “The Triumph of the Cross,” that Giacomo dedicated to his devout mother. He wrote this exercise at the age of thirteen and read it during Lent in 1811 before a local “Congregation of Nobles,” in which he left no bloody detail out of his description of Christ’s crucifixion.[7] Antici always counted on Giacomo’s embrace of a career either in the Church or possibly in an institution of the Church such as the Vatican Library. He was disappointed when his nephew rejected the path that he thought appropriate for an ambitious young man of the aristocracy. Giacomo was hugely ambitious, but not in the manner that seemed correct to Carlo.

Had Giacomo adopted a way of life that pleased his uncle Carlo, he would have benefited materially and socially: Antici was married to Marianna Mattei, whose aristocratic family owned a residence in Rome near via delle Botteghe Oscure, where Giacomo lived during his five-month stay in the eternal city in 1822 and 1823. Carlo, learned and influential, and holder of various administrative positions in the Papal government, accompanied Pope Pius VII in December 1804 on his trip to Paris to crown Napoleon emperor. Among his rewards was being made a “baron of the empire.”[8]

Giacomo’s mother belonged to the most ancient noble family in Recanati, a fact that eventually proved to be of greater importance than certain of her material deficiencies and character traits that for some time had led Monaldo’s mother, Virginia Mosca, to oppose their marriage. No doubt Virginia was eventually won over by another noteworthy fact, that over the centuries the Leopardi and Antici clans had intermarried eight times. At the time of their marriage, Monaldo was “the largest landholder in Recanati.” His wealth had not protected him from stretching his resources beyond their limits in youthful indiscretions, which included breaking his engagement to a woman whose family demanded large monetary recompense as the price of forgiveness.[9]

Monaldo and Adelaide had only qualified success in imparting their values to their first three children: Giacomo, born June 29, 1798, and his two closest siblings, his brother Carlo, born July 12, 1799, and sister Paolina, born October 5, 1800. Carlo grew up to be a handsome and linguistically talented but discontent young man, with a predilection for English literature. His defiant marriage to a cousin, Paolina Mazzagalli, did not please his parents; he paid for his disobedience by being summarily disinherited, and his new wife was not allowed to enter the Leopardi home.[10] Adelaide gave birth to seven other children, in addition to Giacomo, Carlo, and Paolina: a boy, Luigi, who lived only nine days and died on February 19, 1803; another son born in 1804 also named Luigi who was musically gifted and whose death on May 4, 1828 caused Giacomo excruciating pain; and Pierfrancesco (1813–1851), whose marriage and male offspring assured the Leopardi dynasty continued life into the twentieth century.[11] Adelaide’s four other children died in infancy.

Paolina, whom Giacomo and his brother liked to tease by calling her “Don Paolo” because of her typically dark clothing and rather dour expression, while always dutiful and respectful toward her parents, rebelled inwardly, especially against her mother’s ironbound religiosity, which she, Paolina, blamed for her persistent sense of being a prisoner in her own home. She adored Giacomo, and gladly served as his secretary and copier of letters and manuscripts.[12] In the early 1830s, she collaborated with her father as a reader and copy editor of a widely read journal of the time that he helped to found, La Voce della Ragione, an organ of Italy’s most recalcitrant anti-liberal and anti-democratic political thinkers. The journal was one of the instruments with which Monaldo tried to convince as many people as possible that “the freedom of the popular masses was the dearest and most faithful friend that the devil has.”[13] He was comforted in this belief by two of his models of correct thinking, the French writers and philosophers Joseph de Maistre (1754–1821) and Louis de Bonald (1754–1840), both, like Monaldo, titled aristocrats. Paolina never married, despite several promising opportunities to do so, and suffered the travails of a young noblewoman growing up at a time and in a place that left all but the most enterprising and self-reliant women in thrall to a deeply conservative and, at times, suffocating authoritarianism. She died during a stay in Pisa on March 13, 1869.

Carlo was the longest-lived of the family: He died at age seventy-nine in 1878. The relationship between Carlo and Giacomo was unusually close. Typical of Giacomo’s letters to Carlo was one of August 28, 1828, where he assured his brother that “You can believe, my Carlo, how willingly I would do anything for you, that is, for myself, since you and I have been and will always be the same hypostatic person.”[14] Carlo was no less impassioned and devoted in his love for Giacomo. A letter of April 7, 1826, one of many like it, is testimony to an exceptionally deep brotherly love. After complaining about the lethargy and weariness that afflicted him at home in Recanati, he shared these feelings with his brother:

I love you however: if I did not love you, if I felt that this principle of life were dead in me, I would follow the fashion that, as you perhaps know, has taken hold in these wastelands for some months now.[15] But a thousand emotional impulses that I am unable to express to you form within me, and you are their object. I still groan when I remember that last night when we left each other, and the gloomy walk that I took so that I could continue to hear your coach, and the poignant regrets that I felt for you, and the pouring rain that forced me to go inside. To sum it up, for you I still have a heart, and you are still my dear and tender Buccio, to whom no one after me said goodnight when you went to sleep, nor did anyone see you when you awoke before I did. I only wish that when I embrace you again I’ll rediscover my faith in affections and hopes. Otherwise living would not be worth the trouble. I live in you and for you.[16]

If Carlo’s frequent depressions, stubborn independence, and irregular lifestyle disappointed his parents, Giacomo strayed even farther from his parents’ expectations for him. There were both psychological and practical reasons for this which, if looked at in relation to several of his innate gifts and inclinations, help to explain aspects of his life that might otherwise seem to be inconsistent with the love and filial trust that he felt toward his parents, especially toward his father.

Even as a boy, he showed signs of a divided consciousness, one manifestation of which was his struggle to reconcile the privileges that were part of his aristocratic birthright with the demands he began quite early to make on himself as a person committed to truth, beauty, and the cultivation of two human qualities he came to prize more than any others, which he called simply sensibilità and virtù. The former meant not only sensitivity, but something more akin to empathy, a responsiveness to the needs and emotions of other people; the latter involved moral rigor and a strong sense of personal honor. These ideals, coupled with his extraordinary intelligence, allowed him to break through the crust of his family’s aristocratic exclusiveness and develop a more fair-minded attitude toward those less fortunate than he.

One of Leopardi’s earliest attempts to capture his thoughts in brief essay form was a Latin composition on the topic “nobility” that he wrote in 1809, at age eleven, when he was under the tutelage of his second teacher, Don Sebastiano Sanchini. Like Torres, Sanchini was a priest and trusted employee of the Leopardi family.[17] Even at this still tender age Giacomo had already become convinced that nobility was primarily an acquisition of the spirit, something a worthy person of any social class can earn as a result of sustained creative effort and the practice of virtue. His independence of mind was already apparent in this composition, whose theme he took from the Roman satirist Juvenal, author of an aphorism that the intellectually precocious boy used for himself, which was “Virtue is the One and Only Nobility.”[18] Whether he had mainly translated the thoughts of Juvenal or conceptualized the question by himself is hard to say. Whatever the case, it is astonishing to hear the aristocratic scion of an ancient noble family say, at the age of eleven, that “Virtue, even without nobility of birth, raises a man to splendor and elevates him to the highest level.” He then elaborated on this idea by saying more explicitly that “humanity, friendliness, and other virtues are often absent from royal and wealthy homes, while they are quite common in the homes of poor people.”

However, despite these egalitarian sentiments, young Leopardi was also aware that the tangible benefits that were his as a result of his being the first-born son of a titled and landed noble family, whose origins could be traced back to the early thirteenth century, were of inestimable value. They were the means by which he was exempted from the unceasing physical labor that was the lot of ordinary humanity, and free to pursue the humane studies for which he felt an instinctive affinity, above all the languages of classical antiquity, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as French, in which he became remarkably proficient. His conception of life, especially the lure of a life lived heroically, was shaped to a considerable extent by his immersion in the lyrical evocations of love, the adventurous tales, and the moral reflections that comprised what he most admired in the classics, above all in his beloved Greek poets, dramatists, historians, and philosophers, whose language he began to study at age fifteen, and learned entirely on his own. After mastering the rudiments of Greek script and grammar, by using a variety of textbooks and dictionaries he had found in his father’s library or borrowed from friends of his family,[19] his method was to compare Latin and Italian translations of pages that he painstakingly compared with the original Greek texts he was interested in. These were among the “cherished books and labored pages”[20] that absorbed him in his youth, and that formed the backdrop of his occasional glances out of the window of his workroom to catch a glimpse or hear the singing of the girl depicted in his now joyous, now sad, remembrance of the young weaver he named Silvia in the poem that bears her name.

In addition to the material benefits that his family and social class made available to him, Giacomo had access to the literary, historical, and philosophical riches of his father Monaldo’s collection of about 15,000 books and incunabula, one of the noteworthy private libraries of the time that was housed, as it still is today, in four adjoining rooms of the palazzo Leopardi. It was there that young Giacomo began to read and study with a “heroic” zeal that bordered on fanaticism; by age eleven, through his own independent efforts and with the help of his teachers, all priests who had their own quarters in the Leopardi residence, Giacomo laid the groundwork for his brilliant accomplishments as classical philologist and translator. It was there too that he found models for the poems, essays, and satires he was to begin composing in his teenage years.

Apparently, when he reached age fifteen, Leopardi gained access to books that his father Monaldo normally kept off the shelves of his library. These were writings that were either suspected of harboring heterodox opinions or that were already prohibited by the Church that he stored in a “special closet.” They included Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things in an Italian translation done by a scholar named Marchetti, Guicciardini’s History of Italy, the works of Appiano Buonafede, Voltaire’s Candide, and d’Holbach’s Good Sense.[21]

There was another library in the Leopardi residence, tiny in comparison with Monaldo’s, that was also influential even if not always welcome. It was a collection of devotional books belonging to Leopardi’s mother, which she consulted regularly. In between these books’ prayers and instructions were small pieces of paper on which Adelaide kept a record of her family’s significant dates and events, from birth to death.[22] In this domain, she ruled like an absolute monarch. Nothing of religious importance escaped her attention. Indeed, she listened to or eavesdropped on Giacomo’s first confession, anxious lest her firstborn show any signs of a disobedient or rebellious streak.

Young Leopardi was moved by the stories of Christian saints and martyrs that he found readily available in his mother’s small library, but his yearning for valor and heroism made him an even more enthusiastic reader of Greek and Roman history and the epic poems of Homer and Virgil. They were what fed his imagination. He enjoyed acting out the exploits of figures such as Achilles and Aeneas, and with whip in hand commanded his brother and sister to play the parts of enemy soldiers he defeated in battle whenever the spirit moved him. He was always the victor. Almost all of his early literary efforts were based on characters and events taken from ancient histories, plays, and epic poems.[23] The budding poet turned this rich heritage of classical literature into an enduring myth of nobility, which then became the measuring rod with which he evaluated the woeful deficiencies of modern bourgeois civilization.[24]

Monaldo recognized his son’s prodigious talents and gave him constant encouragement. He was a witty and, in his way, perceptive man of letters who enjoyed working side by side with his gifted son in the family library. As a result, father and son developed an extremely close bond. Their intellectual relationship went hand in hand with Monaldo’s concerted effort to keep his eldest son under strict supervision. At dinner time, Giacomo always sat next to his father, who dutifully cut his portions of meat and who treated him like a helpless child well beyond the years when such indulgence was appropriate. Indeed, although it’s hard to believe, according to Carlo Leopardi, Giacomo did not leave his home unaccompanied either by his father (Adelaide almost never ventured outside her home) or by his teacher don Vincenzo Diotallevi, until he was twenty years old.[25] If the boy expressed a wish to visit the homes of other notable families, he could do so, but only if accompanied by his father. It comes as no surprise, given the confined space within which Giacomo lived, and his infrequent contacts with children of his age, except for some town children who played at times in the Leopardi family’s private garden, that he became addicted to “onanistic” gratification when the tension in his home became intolerable. Both Carlo and Paolina felt exactly as Giacomo did about the oppressive atmosphere that often reigned in the Leopardi home. They complained bitterly about it, but were unable to break free until many years later, when they were well into their thirties.

Yet despite these restrictions, and despite later serious disagreements and conflicts, Giacomo respected and loved his father. Ironically, it was Monaldo who awakened in him a burning desire to do something memorable and enduring with his life, to attain greatness, a trait that became a permanent feature of Giacomo’s personality. His mother, Marquise Adelaide Antici—who in addition to her religious qualifications was an expert home manager whose thriftiness literally saved her family from importunate creditors and the threat of bankruptcy by imposing strict limits on her husband’s spendthrift ways—had no direct part in her son’s intellectual efforts, but she did leave a mark on him by her very withdrawal of maternal warmth and her commitment to religious discipline. As indicated, in religious matters, she was an absolutist, and brooked no compromise of principle. Giacomo’s inner life was as much the product of his mother’s example of rigor as of his father’s insistence that a true nobleman should also be a scholar and a perfect gentleman.

The one aspect of young Giacomo’s life on which Monaldo and Adelaide were in complete agreement was their hope that their firstborn son would become a priest and eventually rise to high rank in the Church hierarchy. To this end, they had him wear a tonsure at age twelve, and had no doubts that he would follow the clerical vocation they had marked out for him. But these hopes for their eldest son proved unattainable, for reasons that hinge in part on the main subject of the first three chapters of this study, which is Leopardi’s evolving and highly unconventional conception of nobility. In this facet of his life and thought, as in others, he worked out his philosophy of life on his own terms, even while remaining loyal to his parents and to the heritage that had been transmitted to him by a multi-secular family history.

Let’s look briefly now at Leopardi’s ambivalent feelings about the social world in which he was formed, the provincial Italian aristocracy in the early nineteenth century, a class that remained quite cohesive despite the impact of the French Revolution on the Leopardi clan, as on all other families whose fortunes were tied to inherited privileges going back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

It was mainly through his readings, but also in part by emulating the forceful, if at times perverse, way in which both of his parents conducted themselves, that Leopardi acquired his understanding of nobility as requiring the courage to assert one’s individuality and to be true to one’s own personal vision of the world. Only by being true to one’s own convictions could one hope to win a place for oneself in the pantheon of the world’s great thinkers and writers. His status as an aristocrat of ancient vintage made him fearful of falling from his high station into the pit of mediocrity, of becoming “an unknown, ordinary rank-and-file person”[26] forgotten forever once his mortal existence had come to an end. He gave vent to this fear in a youthful poem, lamenting that “I will be like one of the vulgar herd, / and I will die as if I had never been born, / nor will the world know that I was in the world: / Oh harshest of laws, oh hard fate!”[27] Accompanying this attitude was another notion that became distinctively Leopardian, namely that life, in its animal corporeality, as mere physical existence, was not worth living. One might as well expire without complaint unless one aimed for a higher, nobler purpose. Just to survive for the sake of preserving one’s life and patrimony was not something to which Leopardi attributed any importance whatever. Productivity in and for itself, be it manual or intellectual, was hardly a worthwhile goal unless it involved a lofty redemptive purpose, such as the conception of a new idea, the creation of beautiful music or poetry, or the search for new ways of understanding history and philosophy. Such a posture would seem to be tantamount to an elitist disdain for life as lived by ordinary working people. Due to the circumstances of his birth and the way in which he was habitually protected from what his parents considered the contaminating influence of the “vulgar masses,” Giacomo had something of the superior detachment from ordinary life associated with his social class. This is evident, for example, in a poem of 1826 he addressed to a close friend and fellow aristocrat, the Bolognese Count Carlo Pepoli, where we find a disdainful attitude toward those who spend their lives “breaking clods and tending flocks and trees.”

Yet significantly, in this same poem, the poet evinced equal disdain for those members of his own class who escaped boredom by devoting themselves to “the cult of clothing and hairdressing, / of doing, coming, and going, the empty interest / in carriages and horses, / busy salons and noisy squares and gardens, / games and dinners and exclusive dances.”[28] This was the mordant and liberal side of Leopardi’s literary temperament that drew some of its venom from the work of his eighteenth-century predecessor, Giuseppe Parini (1729–1799), whose satirical portrait of a foppish Milanese nobleman in “The Day” is echoed in Leopardi’s above-mentioned “Epistle to Count Carlo Pepoli.” He might well have taken courage in his effort to free the idea of nobility from its connection with inherited titles and wealth from Parini’s 1757 “Dialogue on Nobility,” where “every claim to hereditary and genetic superiority is taken down from its pedestal.”[29] But as Leopardi well knew, the intertwined themes of nobility, love, and virtue went back in Italian literature much further than Parini, to the luminous dawn of Italian poetry in the late thirteenth century, when Dante and his “best friend” Guido Cavalcanti, together with their older contemporary Guido Guinizelli, proclaimed that “the noble heart,” not noble birth by itself, is the true abode of love and virtue.[30]

On the one hand, his deeply ingrained aristocratic prejudice against manual labor and against any human task undertaken for mere monetary gain, separated young Leopardi from ordinary humanity in ways that were difficult for him to overcome. On the other hand, some of his best poems depicted humble people facing the onslaughts of fate and nature with stoic dignity, or playing and dancing on the village square, momentarily relieved of the troubles that haunt their daily existence. Moreover, as seen in his lovely “Night Song of a Wandering Asian Shepherd,” written in 1829–1830, Leopardi came to recognize and place high value on the ability of ordinary people to reflect on their lives and to ask the kinds of questions about the relationship between finite creatures and the infinite cosmos that also perplexed learned thinkers. For this reason, but also because of his particular sensibilità, he paid careful attention to “the short and simple annals of the poor.”

NOTES

1. “Biografie degli autori,” http://www.parados.it/b%20leopardi.htm. The engraving was the work of Luigi Lolli. In 1845 Domenico Morelli painted Leopardi’s portrait from a death mask with the assistance of Antonio Ranieri; it appears in color in the volume Giacomo Leopardi, ed. Gaetano Macchiaroli.

2. The title of Count was bestowed May 8, 1726 on Giacomo’s great-grandfather Vito Leopardi by Pope Benedict XIII. Wis, 12.

3. Cited in The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi, edited and translated by Geoffrey Bickersteth. Cambridge University Press, 1923, 41.

4. Domenico De Falco, in Gaetano Macchiaroli, editor (b), Giacomo Leopardi, 29.

10. Ferretti ed., 1979, 64–65, n. 1. Their marriage on March 12, 1829 resulted in many years of ostracism; Carlo was finally readmitted to the family circle, but his rancor and alienation remained.