Part Two: Leopardi in Love

Although restrained and modest in his social behavior, Leopardi felt free to open his heart with complete abandon when expressing himself in written form, both in his poetry and in his letters to persons for whom he felt a close attachment. He made no distinction between men and women in this regard. In fact, his letters to men—his brother Carlo, his mentor Pietro Giordani, his companion and “partner” Antonio Ranieri—were more heartfelt and passionate than his letters to women.

Leopardi lived in a historical moment that favored the epistolary genre as a means with which to explore psychologically complex emotions. Some of his best-known contemporaries or near contemporaries, such as Rousseau, Goethe, and Foscolo, used the letter as a literary device for precisely this reason. He read and meditated at length on The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Last Letters of Iacopo Ortis, and entertained for a short while the idea of writing his own epistolary novel.[1] To what extent these two works had any direct impact on Leopardi as a letter writer is hard to say. But that he adopted something of the lavish and unrestrained language of the epistolary genre in his own letters is beyond doubt. One among many examples of this appears in a letter to a friend, the historian Carlo Troya (1784–1858), about his feelings for Antonio Ranieri, toward the end of 1831. After asking for his friend’s help in extricating Ranieri from acute financial embarrassment, he told Troya that the reason for his concern lay in the fact that “we two have become so completely one, that I can hardly imagine how I could exist without him. . . . Of this union, the closest that it is possible to have, I will not say more, so as not to go on forever.” To which he added: “the love that has bound us to each other for some time now is of such a quality that our destinies are no longer separable, so that in recommending him I recommend myself; I am living with the greatest pain because of him.”[2] One of Leopardi’s paramount traits as a lover and friend was his need to merge his identity with that of the beloved person; love, in its most exalted form, was a way of transcending the separateness and alienation of ordinary existence. His conception of love fits quite easily into Massimo Natale’s discussion of the story told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, to the effect that “human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”[3]

Passionate language pervades many of the letters that were written to Leopardi as well as by him. Two examples are, the first in the year 1823, from Pietro Giordani, the second from a good friend in Parma, Ferdinando Maestri, the husband of a woman, Adelaide Maestri, for whom Leopardi also had much affection. Writing to Leopardi in July 1823, Giordani complained that it had been some time since he had received any communication from his young friend, and so was anxious that he “know that I love you as much as one can love in this world; and I feel an intense desire that you have only good things; I think of you constantly, I desire you.”[4] For his part, Maestri, writing from his home in Parma in late July 1834, ended his letter with these words: “Don’t weary of loving someone who loves you with the fervor of an enamored soul.”[5]

Leopardi’s writings, his letters included, although stamped with the exceptionally developed individuality that inspired them, were part of an unbroken continuity of expression that educated readers recognized and identified with. He found a way to make his own the lessons he had learned about love and friendship from Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Castiglione, Sannazzaro, Alfieri, Foscolo, and others. He found his own voice, even while listening intently to his predecessors and to some of his contemporaries. The fact that Petrarch’s Canzoniere [6] has such a ubiquitous presence in Leopardi’s love poems does not mean that he had merely borrowed second-hand tropes and that he lacked originality. It was, rather, a mediating lens through which he looked at the world around him and struggled to give form to the swirl of emotions within him.

Leopardi also drew inspiration from the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and infused his own poetry with imagery and conceits used by such poets as Sappho and Anacreon, among the Greeks, and Virgil and Horace, among the Romans. He believed that a judicious use of classical poetic metaphors added an engaging charm to his poetry, what he called, ironically, a certain “newness” and “freshness” to his verse. In a poem of 1823, “Sappho’s Last Song,” for example, Leopardi lets Sappho herself speak in a somewhat exotic language that was nonetheless emblematic of his own sentiments, just as he let Brutus speak in the poem named for him. Here are the Sapphic yet Leopardian lines that open “Sappho’s Last Song”:

Tranquil night, and bashful light

of the fading moon, and you, emerging

from the quiet woods above the cliff,

herald of day; oh you were joyous, much-loved

sights when I was ignorant of torment

and of fate, but now no gentle scene

comforts my hopelessness.[7]

Leopardi appended a note to the manuscript of this poem about lost love, asking of the metaphor “gentle scene”: “Is it correct to say ‘sweet spectacle,’ ‘sweet view,’ ‘sweet glance,’ etc.? Why therefore can we not transport a word from the spoken language to the eyes, and from touch to the visual sense? I agree that the metaphor is risky, but how much more risky are those of Horace. And if the poet, especially the lyric poet, is not bold in the use of metaphors, and fears the unusual, he will be deprived of the new.”[8] The Italian word for which the English translator chose “gentle” is molle, meaning soft, which is why Leopardi spoke of the sense of touch. The third line of this same passage borrows the image of a “quiet woods” from The Aeneid. Virgil, as we know, served Leopardi’s poetic needs in many different ways.

A nettlesome question to be kept in mind concerning Leopardi’s way of expressing his feelings of love and friendship is the dichotomy in his thought and therefore in his work between the idealization of love for various women, on the one hand, and on the other the blatant misogyny, the mistrust and even contempt for the female gender that poured from his pen in moments of pique, frustration, and disappointment. The question is particularly relevant to the way in which Leopardi depicted the woman he chose to call Aspasia in the poem of 1834 that he dedicated to her.[9] This was one of four poems written in the 1830s, the other three being “The Dominant Idea,” “Love and Death,” and “To Himself,” in which the poet painstakingly singled out the moments of delight but more prominently the moments of terrible pain that he had experienced in his two-year-long emotional involvement with Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti. The fact that his relationship with this attractive Florentine lady was not only between the two of them, but also included Leopardi’s partner, as of November 1930, Antonio Ranieri, provoked a good bit of spicy gossip in the Florence of the early 1830s. Ranieri was one of Fanny’s favorite suitors; she was much more strongly drawn to the sturdy and vigorous Ranieri than she was to the frail looking, and sometimes malodorous, Leopardi.[10] The poet was scrupulous in his choice of words, but not always careful in matters of personal hygiene.

In this case, therefore, in addition to the questions of language and literary appropriations, we have to deal with two aspects of Leopardi’s mind that must be understood in their historical context. To understand all is not to pardon all, but unless we are mindful of how Leopardi saw women in his mature years, and how he conceptualized what it was, exactly, that he was pursuing in his amatory adventures, we lose touch with the specificity of his poetic universe.

As far as the poem Aspasia is concerned, we need not worry about vagueness and uncertainty of motive. Responding to a query from Fanny not long after Leopardi’s death concerning the identity of Aspasia, Antonio Ranieri, who was never far from Leopardi’s side over the almost four years the two men lived together in Naples, from October 1833 to June 1837, told her forthrightly: “You are Aspasia.”[11] These blunt words were shocking to her; she insisted that she had never given Leopardi the slightest reason to raise his hopes of becoming her lover. Probably she was telling the truth. But two principles were operative in Leopardi as he looked back on his years of thralldom. One was the frankly sensual side of her appeal to him, captured nicely in lines ten to twenty-six of Aspasia; but a few years after his moments of rapture, he realized that what he had worshiped in and through her was not the person Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti, but an ideal of womanhood that existed only in his mind, as a beautiful abstraction. She was one of several examples of “the woman who cannot be found,” the woman who occupied a space in his interior life, where fancies and illusions of all sorts germinated ceaselessly. It was the idea of love, and not the object of love, that the poet was chasing.

Leopardi first formulated the idea of desirable womanhood who exists only in his mind and “fantasy” in his dedication to the 1824 Bolognese edition of his canzoni; the following remarks concern a canzone of 1823, “To His Lady”:

This is the shortest of all my ten canzoni, and perhaps the least extravagant, except in subject. The lady, that is, the woman loved by the author, is one of those images of beauty and of heavenly and ineffable virtue, that happen to us often in our fantasies, in sleep and in our waking hours, when we are young. In short, she is the woman who cannot be found. The author does not know whether his lady (and by calling her this shows that he loves only her) has ever been born up to now, or could ever be born; he knows that now she does not live on the earth, and that we are not her contemporaries; he looks for her among Plato’s ideas, he looks for her on the moon, in the planets of the solar system, in the systems of the stars. If this canzone can be called amorous, it will also be certain that this kind of love can neither give nor suffer jealousy, because, apart from the author, no earthly lover will want to make love with a telescope.[12]

The realization that what he loved was not a flesh and blood woman but a “fantasy,” based on a psychological phenomenon to which Leopardi attributed great importance, is what underlies lines thirty-three to forty-seven of Aspasia, which end with the moment of awareness that love of the kind he had been entranced by was precisely that, an entrancement, real only so long as his mind and imagination had lived under its spell:

Lady, your beauty was a ray of heavenly

light to my thinking. Beauty and musical

harmony have similar effects,

for it often seems that they reveal

the mysteries of hidden Paradises.

So the wounded mortal dreams

the daughter of his mind, the amorous idea,

this piece of heaven that he keeps to himself,

in face, in habits, and expression equal

to the one the enraptured lover wants

to dream about and love in his confusion;

yet it’s not she whom he reveres and loves,

even as he holds her, but the other.

At last he sees the error of his misplaced

feelings and becomes enraged, and often

wrongly blames the woman.[13]

These are not mere conceits. They flowed from a genuine part of the poet’s inner life, they were the very stuff of his joy but more often of his pain. Rarely if ever did Leopardi speak more honestly of the pain that was virtually built into all of his relationships with women than in lines eighty-nine to one hundred one of this poem. But his honesty and courage, which should never be underestimated, are not what is at issue here. My concern is with the lines that immediately follow the words “blames the woman” that end the passage cited above. One would have the right at this turning point in the poem to expect the poet to enlarge upon the blame wrongfully ascribed to the idealized woman. That is not what happens. Instead Leopardi composed a little poetic disquisition on women’s intellectual and moral inferiority to men. In other words, the whole experience of love begins and ends in the man’s mind; the woman has nothing intrinsically to do with it—she is merely an enticing object that makes the man veer away from what his reason could have told him from the beginning, that she is only a figment of his fevered brain. Unlike Sappho, to whom Leopardi gave a voice of her own, Aspasia exists only as a heady hothouse flower that casts its spell for a short time, then fades away when its admirer becomes aware of its power over him. Leopardi expounded this notion in the following verses:

At last he sees the error of his misplaced

feelings and becomes enraged, and often

wrongly blames the woman. Rarely

does feminine nature rise to this high ideal.

And what inspires her noble lovers,

her very beauty, woman doesn’t see

and isn’t capable of understanding;

their narrow minds can’t take in such ideas.

In the bright flash of her looks

the bewitched man wrongly hopes for, wrongly seeks,

deep, mysterious, and much more than manly

understanding, in one who naturally

is less than man in everything. For if her limbs

are softer and more tender, she’s also given

a mind that’s less capacious and less strong.[14]

Silvio Trentin may have been correct when he said that Leopardi saw himself as Italy’s “knight and troubador”[15] of love. If so, he was a troubador of strangely conflicted feelings about the women he was serving with his poetry and his knightly valor.

The course of love between Leopardi and the women he was, or thought he was, smitten by consistently followed a precipitous downward spiral. One dramatic example of this occurred in his year-long infatuation with another Florentine noblewoman who had moved with her husband to Bologna, where Leopardi met her in 1826, during a relatively pleasant period of his life. He was gainfully employed by the Milanese publisher Antonio Stella, was giving tutorial lessons in Greek and Latin to several aristocratic gentlemen, and was received with open arms by the Bolognese intelligentsia.

The woman in question was Teresa Carniani Malvezzi (1785–1859). At age sixteen, she married Count Francesco Malvezzi de’ Medici. Unlike most women of her social class, after completing a course of study at the University of Bologna in philosophy and in classical and modern languages, she devoted much of her time to scholarly and creative endeavors. Her passion for English literature and for the English language is shown in her verse translation of Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.” She put her training in the classics to good use in her translations of several works by Cicero. She was also known for her poem in ottava rima, “La cacciata del tiranno Gualtieri,”[16] which appeared in Florence from 1827 to 1832. Her intellectual accomplishments were among the qualities that Leopardi found unusually attractive.[17] She came closer than any other woman in Leopardi’s life to being his soul mate.

The poet’s first meeting with Teresa occurred in the spring of 1826, at a dinner party in Bologna. Almost immediately there was a flash of mutual sympathy and attraction between the two. Leopardi wrote about it soon thereafter to his brother Carlo. He let it be known to Carlo that their age difference (he was twenty-eight at the time, she forty-one) was not an obstacle to their reciprocal affection. Their common interests, her appreciation of his poetry, and a delicacy of feeling that he had sensed in her were of paramount importance.

Interestingly, and typically for Leopardi, in the extracts from this letter of May 30, 1826 that I am about to cite, Leopardi was really concerned with two people, Teresa and his brother Carlo. When describing his interactions with Teresa, he was explicit about the reasons for his finding her so desirable; yet the language of love he used to express his feelings for Carlo, whom he credits for restoring his ability to feel love again, after a long period of emotional drought, belong to that realm of unqualified and absolute love that he reserved for men. In the following passage, note the cautious and world-weary tone of what he tells Carlo about himself and Teresa, as compared with the words he used in characterizing his relationship with his brother. First, here is what Leopardi said to his brother about his new relationship with Teresa:

I have entered into a relationship with a married woman (Florentine by birth) who belongs to one of this city’s most important families, a relationship that now forms a large part of my life. She isn’t young, but has a grace about her (believe me, that up to now I thought was impossible) that takes the place of youth. In the first days that I knew her, I lived in a kind of delirium and fever. We have never spoken of love unless in jest, but we live together in a tender and sensitive friendship, with mutual interest, and an abandon that is like an undisturbed love. She has very high regard for me; if I read her something of mine, she often cries freely without affectation; other people’s praise has no substance for me, hers is transformed entirely in blood, and remains in my heart. She loves and understands literature and philosophy; we never lack for things to talk about, and almost every evening I am with her from the evening Angelus to past midnight. We confide all of our secrets to each other, we scold each other, we tell each other about our defects. All in all our acquaintance forms and will form a clearly marked period of my life, because it has freed me of my disillusionment, it has convinced me that there really are pleasures in the world that I thought impossible, and that I am still capable of stable illusions, despite the awareness and the contrary habit that is so rooted in me, and has reawakened my heart, after a sleep or better a complete death that has lasted so many years.[18]

Even in this exuberant outpouring of emotion, Leopardi hedged his enthusiasm by using the almost oxymoronic phrase “stable illusions” to describe what he was experiencing in relation to Teresa. Illusions, for Leopardi, while essential to the happiness or contentment of most people as they go through life, are by definition impermanent, or at least subject to the rude shocks of reality, and can leave an individual bereft of hope when they disappear. He reveals as well the fact that Teresa was married, but says nothing more about her husband other than that, as seen in the surname de’ Medici, he belonged to the city’s elite social stratum.

All of the women in whom Leopardi had a serious amorous interest were married. His first love, evoked in the poem with that title, was for an older married woman, his cousin Geltrude Cassi Lazzari (1791–1853), whose prepossessing figure and solicitous interest in him during a brief visit to the Leopardi home in 1817, aroused the same feelings of “delirium and fever” that he describes in relation to Teresa. Ten years later, during a stopover at Geltrude’s home in Pesaro, all that remained of his passion for her was a remark, made in passing to his father, that “she looked well, and has lost some weight since the last time I saw her.”[19] Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti was also married, to a prominent physician. Extra-marital love affairs in Leopardi’s time were a more or less accepted part of life, something that did not necessarily have to break up a marriage. Yet Leopardi’s habit of falling in love with married women, when considered in the light of his persistent misogyny, makes one wonder about the possibly unresolved emotional tensions influencing his choices of love objects, which had built into them a defensible rationale for why he had to repudiate them.

Let’s look now at the words with which the enamored poet spoke about his feelings for his brother Carlo at the end of his letter about Teresa. Here we learn that it was not only Teresa who enabled him to love again, after years of emotional somnolence that felt as final as death, but Carlo, too, had sustained him and given him a reason to live despite all of the unhappiness and despair that had blighted the poet’s young life. In these words, there is no trace of reserve, no hint of caution and guardedness. They form part of a collective greeting to his family:

Tell Luigi that I’ll do my level best to find the music he wants. Say hello fervently to Dad and Mom, Paolina, Luigi, Pietruccio. Write to me, my soul, and believe that if I am recovering my power to love, in equal measure does the strength and tenderness of the mad love that I have for you grow day by day, and that for so long a time has been my soul’s only hold on life.

Carlo, not Teresa, was the real source of Leopardi’s emotional well-being, the person with whom he had shared all of the travails of his body and his spirit, from early childhood. They had slept side by side for years, awakened to the same sights and sounds, heard the same voices of servants and tutors urging them to eat enough, to study, to observe the standards of comportment their parents expected of them. I’ll have more to say later about Leopardi’s feelings for his mother and father; at this moment it is enough to observe that, if seen as a counterweight to his mother’s distant and severe demeanor, Teresa’s appreciation of him as a person and as a poet must have been heartwarming.

A year later the relationship between Leopardi and Teresa was in shambles; her failure to answer one of his letters promptly, and Leopardi’s suspicion that she was gossiping about him, were evidently the immediate causes of his anger. Writing on April 18, 1827, he told her how offended he had been by her long delay in answering him, and added that he had nothing to say about a translation she had asked him to evaluate, entitled Fragments of Cicero’s Republic,[20] which had been published earlier that year. He gave a mutual friend his opinion of her poem La cacciata del tiranno Gualtieri, whose plot, based on a medieval struggle against tyranny, was something he cared deeply about, in two words: “Poor woman!” But there was a much sharper arrow in Leopardi’s quiver, which he let loose not directly against her, but in a letter to their mutual friend, and his tutorial student, the Venetian Count Antonio Papadopoli, that was certain to damage her reputation in Bologna. On May 21, 1827, ten days short of a year since he had written to Carlo with such unaccustomed enthusiasm, he asked his friend:

How can you get it in your head that I’m still going to visit that whore Malvezzi? I’d rather that my nose fall off, if since I heard the tittle-tattle that she has spread about me, I have gone back to see her or will ever go back; and if I don’t say all the bad things I could about her. The other day, I ran into her, and turned my face to the wall in order to avoid seeing her.[21]

Three years later, Teresa tried to mend fences with him by telling him how much pain he had inflicted on her by leaving Bologna for Florence without saying anything to her. The letter was addressed to “my most revered Count,” and signed “Your most Humble and Devoted Servant.” It was a short note, simply stating how hurt she had been by “his failure to call on us” before departing. This suggests that despite the rupture in intimacy between them, they had remained on speaking terms in the highborn social milieu of salons and receptions they both frequented in Bologna.[22]

Leopardi was drawn to women who were physically strong and vigorous in appearance. His cousin Mathilde Cassi fit this description, and from what we can guess from pictures of Carniani Malvezzi and Targioni-Tozzetti, they too were women who displayed strength and self-confidence.[23] Portraits of them set side by side with one of Leopardi are striking in the contrast between the women’s rather imposing heads and shoulders, topped by impressively coiffed hairdos, and the slightly pinched gaze that the twenty-eight-year-old poet shows to the viewer. There is a suggestion of shyness or stiffness in his bearing, probably due either to the strain of coping with his normally stooped posture, caused by a hunched back and a corresponding malformation at the top of his chest, or to a brace of some sort that he may have worn to straighten his head and shoulders. What further points up the contrast between Leopardi and his lady-loves is that they are all shown in a full frontal view, while Leopardi looks out at the viewer from a three-quarter angle, obliquely, as befitting a man accustomed to questioning the world around him.

None of these complex and unpleasant aspects of Leopardi’s feelings about women should make us forget that the need to love and be loved was the all-consuming passion of his life, one that he communicated to everyone whose friendship he valued. This is what he was referring to when he told his brother Carlo, in a letter of November 25, 1822, written during a five-month stay in Rome, that “I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life.”[24] Love for him was synonymous with the life force, as indispensable to human spirituality as food was to the body’s survival.

Yet at the same time, as we have seen, there were components of his personality that created insuperable obstacles to the free flow of positive emotion that he longed to have in his relations with women, but was unable to have except for those short periods of time, such as the months he spent in the company of Teresa Carniani Malvezzi, when the spur of infatuation temporarily overcame what appears to have been his lurking fear of sexual intimacy with a woman. Regarding this aspect of his life, if we can believe what Antonio Ranieri said of him, Leopardi went to his grave a virgin,[25] despite the fact that he confessed on more than one occasion to having felt a “furious passion” in his early years, to such an extent that he had been very close to taking his own life “because of my crazy fits of love.”[26] There were women in his life, young, pretty country girls to whom he dedicated a few of his poems; teenage girls whom he named Silvia and Nerina. But with one exception,[27] they were not objects of desire; rather, they symbolized fleeting moments of serene happiness, when youth and hope are exuberantly alive. Their lives and early deaths were for the poet emblematic of the supreme injustices inflicted on humankind not by God, but by Nature.

There were effectively two sides of Leopardi’s personality that contested for primacy in his feelings about love. One was the person who placed love at the very summit of the human experience. This was what compelled him to entreat his friend de Sinner, in 1832, “not to tire of loving me: you will not find in me other merits, but a loving soul, a very intensely loving soul, you will find in me for as long as I am alive.”[28] But the same man who made such impassioned statements about his need to give and receive love, and who raised love to the pinnacle of human achievement, was also filled with anger and contempt for the female gender. There was a virulent and vitriolic side of Leopardi’s personality in this regard that we need to look at, in order to appreciate his final struggle to overcome alienation in his personal relationships and in his life as a poet and thinker.

Why he became such a thoroughgoing misogynist is difficult to say. The sexual inhibitions and consequent frustrations that he experienced while growing up in a home that actively opposed normal interaction between the Leopardi children and the outside world may have had something to do with it. He spent a great deal of time fantasizing about the opposite sex while remaining aloof from flesh and blood women, except for peasant and working-class girls whom he knew as a boy and adolescent who were unavailable to him as friends and potential sexual partners. Another possible reason for Leopardi’s sexual problems was his fear that he was ugly, and his feeling of embarrassment about his partially malformed body. If we add to this his practically lifelong struggle with various illnesses, it isn’t difficult to understand why he might have succumbed to conflicted feelings about the objects of his desire.

Apart from his mother, Leopardi was in close touch with three female relatives: his paternal grandmother Virginia Mosca, his aunt Ferdinanda Melchiorri, and his sister Paolina. From what we know about his relationships with these three women, there does not seem to be anything that suggests feelings of ambivalence and alienation. On the contrary, his paternal grandmother was a person with whom he and his siblings spent many joyful hours listening to her stories and parables. She came from a prominent family in Pesaro, and brought considerable wealth and prestige to her husband, Leopardi’s grandfather Giacomo, who died at the age of fifty in 1791. Like other women of her social class, her widowhood was comforted by an elderly cavalier servente named Volumnio Gentiliaco, who accompanied her to social events and other special occasions.[29]

Ferdinanda, Monaldo’s younger sister, lived in Rome with her husband, Marquis Pietro Melchiorri, to whom she was betrothed at the age of sixteen.[30] She followed closely and supported Giacomo’s intellectual development.[31] As a result, he confided in her, and she gave him sage advice about how to overcome the strains in his relationships with his parents.[32] She also urged him to put his trust in providence and God, the best antidote, she thought, to her nephews’s “pessimism and melancholy,” as she said in a letter to Giacomo of February 2, 1820, a year or so after his failed attempt to escape from Recanati.[33] As for his sister Paolina, she was a loyal companion and friend, and was as angry about the restrictions of life imposed on her at home as were Giacomo and Carlo. These three women, we can safely say, fed the young poet’s need for the kind of love that can help a young man become a better person, dream of heroic actions, and devote himself to literature and the arts.[34] On the other hand, neither of these three women could give Giacomo the kind of emotional warmth that, except in rare instances, only a mother can bestow on a child. Growing up virtually starved for such warmth might help to explain why Leopardi grew up with profoundly mixed feelings about his mother, and therefore about other women as well.

Leopardi left a frank and fearless portrait of Adelaide in an entry of November 1820 in the Zibaldone, the notebook of thoughts and observations he began keeping in July 1817 and continued up to the early 1830s, one of the most intellectually rich works of its kind ever written. Some of the entries in the Zibaldone deal with episodes of the poet’s life that he spoke of only rarely, and confided to very few people, such as the pages where he writes of “a mother of a family” who can only have been his own mother, there being no other woman in his life who fits his description of her in his notebook. The effect on him of such a mother could easily have been powerful and insidious enough to last a lifetime. Some of what he said of her, which forms part of his thoughts on “ways in which the Christian religion is contrary to nature,” reads as follows:

I have known intimately a mother of a family who was not at all superstitious, but extremely rigorous and exact in the practices of religion. This mother not only did not feel compassion for parents who lost their children at a young age, but envied them intimately and sincerely, because these children had gone to paradise without any danger, and had freed their parents of the burden of caring for them. Finding herself several times in danger of losing her children at this same early age, she didn’t ask God to let them die, because religion doesn’t allow it, but she was as happy as can be within herself; and seeing her husband weep or afflicted by grief, she withdrew into herself and felt a real and visible contempt. . . . She considered beauty to be a real misfortune, and seeing her children ugly or malformed, she thanked God, not out of heroism, but with complete acceptance. She did not seek any means of helping them to hide their defects, on the contrary she demanded, in view of these defects, that they renounce life in their early youth: if they resisted, if they sought the opposite, if they succeeded in some small measure, she felt spite, she did as much as she could to dilute their successes with her words and opinions . . . and never lost a chance, and even sought every opportunity, to throw up their defects in their faces, so that they would understand their defects, and the consequences that they could expect, and persuade them of their inevitable misery, with a pitiless and ferocious truthfulness.[35]

There are many things one might say about this terrifying passage. The most obvious implication of what Leopardi says about this unnamed mother is that she was entirely incapable of giving maternal love to her children,[36] that they were driven to seek out other surrogate figures if it was maternal tenderness they needed. What can easily escape the reader’s attention is Leopardi’s reference to this mother’s attitude toward her children’s ugliness or malformation. As far as can be determined, he can only be speaking of himself here, since he was the only member of his family afflicted by a malformation of the spine, which, together with his fear that he was ugly, gave him persistent feelings not of inferiority, but of loneliness, a fear of not belonging to a social world that accepted him. It engendered in him a sense of alienation, from his own body as much as from other people. All of this conflicts with the many significant reasons he had to be self-confident, his consciousness of bearing within himself a legacy of prestige and accomplishment, nourished constantly by adoring aunts and uncles, visiting dignitaries, teachers, and by his own father, Count Monaldo, who looked to his firstborn son for companionship and intellectual stimulation. Apropos of Monaldo, we should notice also in the above-cited passage the evanescent allusion to the father, whose tears of grief give him a special place in this memorable portrait of an over-zealous, indeed, fanatically religious person.

Another thing we should take from this passage is its characterization of the mother’s “pitiless and ferocious truthfulness.” Several writers have noted, and I with them, that while Monaldo’s influence on the aspiring poet and classicist was an important one in terms of his general direction in life and devotion to things of the mind, Leopardi was able to take what he could from his father, and go his own way intellectually and politically, even if in his private life he continued to need his father’s financial help. Achieving independence from a parent’s “pitiless and ferocious truthfulness” would demand a far greater effort on a child’s part. It’s doubtful that he ever really became independent of this influence. In fact, a facet of Leopardi’s personality that I have taken note of several times was his own brand of absolutism, his own awesome rigor when it was a matter of making his own radical materialist philosophy plain to all concerned, something he did over and over again, in his poetry, as in his satirical poems and his odes, including “The Broom Plant,” and in his prose writings, the Essays and Dialogues and the Pensieri in particular. His rejection of otherworldly, supernatural, mystical, and providential conceptions of life was as absolute and uncompromising as Adelaide’s belief in precisely what her son repudiated. But the mindset was common to both, the steely determination and inner resources required to hold extreme views about life and death. Monaldo was as devout a believer as his wife, but not with her single-minded militance. When an Italian journalist went to visit her some years after Leopardi’s death, with the express purpose of conveying to the poet’s mother how much he had admired her son’s poetry, she looked at him, expressionless, and said: “May God forgive him.”[37]

If we take into account the conflicted emotions that the sensitive young man felt in relation to his mother, we can readily understand the mixed and ambivalent feelings about women that he carried around with him throughout his life. Adding further complications to her fanatical religiosity, Adelaide ran her household like a drill sergeant. She dressed and moved about her home in an almost “military” manner. From the day in 1803 that she took over the management of the family’s finances, she was admired yet feared, looked up to with gratitude for rescuing her family from potentially ruinous debts, yet secretly seen by her children as being as unfair and withholding as their father was available and indulgent. Carlo found her imperiousness intolerable, and was convinced that she opened his mail. Paolina suffered as well when her mother discouraged her occasional ventures outside the home in search of friends, because such friendships “take a person away from God.”[38]

The extent to which Leopardi’s assertions and opinions concerning women are directly attributable to his reaction in childhood to a cold, distant, and fanatically religious mother is impossible to say. What matters are the psychological dynamics that made him turn away from women in fits of frustration and even rage, and find love in the embrace of a man. We should keep in mind, as evidenced by the passage from the Zibaldone, the contrast in the poet’s mind between the mother’s severe and unyielding attitude toward the death or physical malformation of her children, and the father’s tears and grief, which in essence reverses the roles conventionally given to men and women.

Concerning women, Leopardi’s letters and other writings reveal the rancorous and embittered side of his personality almost as vividly as his poem of 1833, “To Himself,” which we will look at below. A good example is provided by one of Leopardi’s pensieri (thoughts) where the poet opines that “the world belongs, like women, to those who seduce it, enjoy it, and trample on it.”[39] This is only one among many such references to women as more or less mindless, ready to be seduced and mastered by any dominant male, a category to which he did not feel he belonged. There are many others, some in a different key altogether, but always plainly insulting.

In a letter to his cousin and good friend Giuseppe Melchiorri, who had asked for his advice about a disappointing love affair, Leopardi, after recalling his own youthful “passions,” had this to say: “I would be doing an injustice to your good sense if I were to remind you that women are not worth the pain of loving them and suffering for them. You must agree with me that there is not nor can there be a woman worthy of being truly loved.” His point was that at best women were to be courted “for purposes of amusement,” not as potential partners in life’s serious enterprises.[40]

A letter to another friend, Pietro Brighenti, written six years later, on August 14, 1829, is more pointed about women’s moral failings. In it he expressed the view that “the coldness and the egotism today, the ambition, the self-interest, the perfidy, the insensitivity of women whom I define as a heartless animal, are things that frighten me.”[41] Leopardi sometimes brought himself into the equation, as in a letter written at about the same time as the one to Melchiorri, this time to the same Brighenti, acknowledging that he lacked “the wealth and power” that women seek in their lovers. Moreover, he confessed, in a mood of self-deprecation, “in my condition, despised and ridiculed by everyone, I have no asset with which to attract their flattery. In addition to which I have a soul that has been so frozen and withered by continuous unhappiness, and also by my miserable awareness of the truth, that before having loved I lost the ability to love, and an angel of beauty and grace would not be enough to excite my interest.”[42]

With regard to beauty and grace, on several occasions, in line with his preference for strong, vigorous women, Leopardi revealed that he thought the male sex was more beautiful than the female. Any objective study of the human species and of masculine and feminine beauty, he thought, “would give the preference to the male, and would call the man more beautiful than the woman, whom we call nevertheless ‘the fair sex.’” This suggests that there was also an aesthetic and possibly a covertly homosexual aspect of his responses to men and women, an instinctive preference for the male over the female body.[43] It’s not surprising that among his classical translations was one of a satirical poem on women written by the Greek poet Semonides of Amorgos in the mid-seventh century B.C. He had no compunctions about making this poem accessible to the reading public; on the contrary, he was eager to do so. In his satire the Greek poet described in a series of grotesque portraits various feminine “types” that he compared to different animals, whose vicious traits he derided with obvious pleasure. It’s a funny poem, with a venomous wit, that can be enjoyed if the reader holds his nose before jumping in. Evidently Leopardi’s sense of humor also had its misogynistic facet.[44]

On reading the above-cited assertions and many other similar ones, we could easily forget that the man who expressed such disdain for women, and such resignation to his lot in life as an unloved and unlovable person, was the same person who said of himself, countless times, that he was “born to love, and perhaps with as much feeling as any living soul can ever have.” It seems clear that the intensity of his anger when women such as Teresa Carniani Malvezzi and Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti either spurned him as a lover or demoted him to the rank of ardent friend, was what led him to write the late poem “To Himself,” where the splenetic side of his personality explodes off the page. The poem belongs to the Aspasia cycle, and reflects the breakup of his two-year courtship of Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti, which constituted the coup de grâce to any hopes he might still have had in 1833 of finding a satisfying, mutual, confident love relationship with and for a woman.

Now you’ll rest forever,

worn-out heart. The ultimate illusion

that I thought was eternal died. It died.

I know not just the hope but the desire

for loved illusions is done for us. Be still forever.

You have beaten enough.

Nothing deserves your throbbing, nor is earth

worth sighing over. Life is only

bitterness and boredom, and the world is filth.

Now be calm. Despair for the last time.

Death is the one thing

fate gave our kind.

Disdain yourself now, nature, the brute

hidden power that rules to common harm,

and the boundless vanity of all.[45]

Leopardi was evoking the power of two separate religious traditions at the end of this poem, the ancient Zoroastrian belief that an ineradicable “evil principle” has inhabited the world since its original creation,[46] and the book of Ecclesiastes. But unlike the ancient Hebrew author of this book, who bids us to “eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toils under the sun the few days of [our] life which God has given [us],” Leopardi offers no consoling alternative to his sense of universal vanity. The poet’s despair is absolute and final, and death alone awaits us when we have finally realized that it is only our “deceptions,” our illusions, that protect us from brutal reality.

NOTES

1. Lettere (Damiani), xii. Leopardi’s early autobiographical memories and reflections on love in semi-fictional form appear in Memorie e pensieri d’amore.

2. Epistolario (Moroncini), Volumes 6/7, 130–32, letter of 12/19/1831; English translation of letter by Iris Origo, 260.

3. Plato’s Symposium, in Five Dialogues, trans Benjamin Jowett, ed. Louise Ropes Loomis, New York, Walter J. Black, 1942, 182. See Massimo Natale, in chapter two, “Il sublime, la Bibbia, ‘Il pensiero dominante,’” in Il canto delle idee, 56–57, and especially in chapter three, “Leopardi, il ‘Simposio,’ e “l’inno a Eros,’” 87–119.

4. Epistolario (Moroncini), Volume 3, 23–24.

5. Epistolario (Moroncini), Volumes 6/7, 273, letter of July 24, 1834.

6. The 366 “scattered poems” consisting of sonnets, odes, and ballads written by Petrarch mainly in honor of the life and death of Laura, but also on other political and historical subjects.

7. Leopardi (Galassi), 85.

8. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti (Gallo and Gárboli), 83, n. 7.

9. Aspasia was the lifelong companion of Pericles, the great Athenian orator and statesman of the fifth century B.C.

10. In her biography of Leopardi, Iris Origo cites a remark made by Fanny to the novelist Matilde Serao, who asked her whether she had ever thought of Leopardi as a potential lover. She said no, adding: “My dear, he stank!” Origo, 283.

11. Benucci, ed. (b), 146–47.