16 Women in Leopardi’s Intellectual and Sentimental Life

Among the women who played an important role in Leopardi’s intellectual and emotional life during the 1820s and 1830s, the most important was his sister Paolina. She exemplified the mortifying effects that extreme domestic authoritarianism and religious bigotry had on sensitive women of the aristocracy. When she was young, in order to live an independent life, she would have had to make a complete break with her family, and maintain her integrity in the face of accusations from all quarters, including no doubt that of her mother and few personal friends. Leopardi could easily have looked on his sister as a case of “there but for the grace of God go I,” for he too, and Carlo as well, experienced some of the same prohibitions and biases that plagued Paolina’s life. But as men, they had more freedom to shape their own lives, and were not as tightly controlled by their parents and close relatives, and by the kind of restrictions on women’s freedom that were taken for granted in the society of the time.

Of course, in the period under consideration, there were aristocratic and middle-class women in Italy who were independent, either because of their wealth or because, unlike the Leopardis, the families to which they belonged had no objections to women’s independence. They were in a distinct minority, and the Leopardis were not one of them.

Some of the women who played a part in Leopardi’s intellectual and social life were Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti, Princess Charlotte Bonaparte, and Carlotta Medici Lenzoni, who was a direct descendant of the Medici dynasty, in Florence; Duchess Margherita d’Altemps, in Rome; Teresa Carniani Malvezzi, in Bologna; and Antonietta Tommasini and Adelaide Maestri, in Parma. Two other accomplished women of the world with whom Leopardi was in touch were the Roman Enrica Dionigi Orfei, a poet who contributed to a translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the Bolognese Cornelia Rossi Martinetti, author of a novel written in French, entitled L’Amélie. Leopardi considered her “the woman with the most charming manners in Italy.”[1]

Paolina Leopardi, although a noblewoman, had no chance to free herself from familial restraints other than through marriage. For various reasons, one of which was an inconspicuous dowry that discouraged prospective suitors, she remained single throughout her life, despite Leopardi’s own strenuous efforts to find her a suitable spouse. She finally rejected the one man whom she genuinely loved, Raniero Roccetti, a bureaucrat in the Papal government who was related to her on her father’s side.[2] He was the son of Giuseppe Roccetti and Geltrude Melchiorri, Giuseppe Melchiorri’s sister. Her reason for breaking off her engagement with the man she loved was that she had heard he was a “woman-chaser” and she feared he would lose interest in her.[3] With this self-protective, if understandable, action, Paolina gave up one of the few chances she had to free herself from domestic tyranny.

All of Paolina’s activities were rigorously monitored by her mother; she did not really gain her independence until her mother’s death in 1857, when she took over administration of the Leopardi family estate (Monaldo died in 1847). As soon as her circumstances allowed, she began to travel, and occupied herself with reading, writing, attending concerts and operas, and cultivating her friendships. She died in Leopardi’s, and her, favorite city, Pisa, in 1869. It is said that soon after Giacomo’s death in 1837, Paolina, on learning that her brother had lost his Christian faith, was deeply aggrieved, and blamed herself for never having truly understood him.[4]

The main sources of insight into Paolina’s life are her letters to her siblings and friends, and Leopardi’s letters to her, which shed light on how women of her class managed to participate, within limits, in the intellectual ventures of the men in their lives. For Paolina, this meant essentially Giacomo, Carlo, and Monaldo. She was also close to several of the Leopardi family’s friends and tutors, especially with Don Sebastiano Sanchini. Her humanistic interests, or her “humanity,” as Leopardi preferred to call it, were chiefly as a reader of current fiction, and as a letter-writer to other young women whose friendship was indispensable to her sense of herself as an individual not entirely defined by her rank in society and her role in the Leopardi family. Her individuality was never given full recognition by her parents. She was forced at times to use elaborate ruses in order to send and especially to receive mail independently. Sanchini made a pact with her to receive letters from family and friends and to pass them on to Paolina, to avoid intrusions by her mother. Whenever a letter for her, but addressed to him, arrived, the good-hearted priest placed a vase of flowers on a windowsill opposite Paolina’s bedroom. She retrieved them when no one was looking. This appears to be the outermost limits of secrecy on her own behalf that Paolina allowed to herself.

Her love for Giacomo was absolute and boundless. She felt no inhibition in telling him how much she loved him, as in a letter of October 21, 1825, a period when he was working in Bologna and Milan on various projects with the publishers Antonio Stella and Pietro Brighenti. She wrote: “I have a moment to tell you, o my Giacomuccio, how much your sister loves you, how often she thinks of you, speaks of you, how often in every moment she remembers you. And how sweet it is to hear from you that you love me, that you remember me amidst your activities and amusements.”[5] In another letter of the same period, she was equally affectionate, but also revealed the degree to which her actions at home were kept under a constantly watchful eye: “Finally I can at least once greet my dear Giacomuccio,” she wrote, “and tell him how anxiously I have waited and tried for so long to be able to write in one of Dad’s or Carlo’s letters, but always to no avail. . . . Only to me it was very painful not to able to tell you after so long a time how much love I feel for you, intensely and passionately (and believe me I am not exaggerating at all), and how often I have a desire, a mad urge, almost a rage, that I don’t see you any more, except in my dreams.”[6]

The feelings between brother and sister were mutual. Part of Leopardi’s humanism resided precisely in the intimate realm of family affection, where he gave of himself unstintingly whenever he was called on to do so. He was always available to his sister, as he was to his brother Carlo, with words and acts of support and encouragement. He mixed philosophical advice with anecdotes and expressions of keen interest in Paolina’s struggle to assert herself. He was also completely open with her about the dreamy and “romantic” feelings he had, as in a letter to her from Pisa, a city he found ideally suited to his temperament: “I always dream about you and the family,” he said, “sleeping and awake: here in Pisa I have a certain delightful street that I call the byway of remembrances: I go to walk there when I want to dream with my eyes open. I assure you that in things of the imagination, I have the feeling that I have gone back to the good old days.”[7] Many years later, after her mother’s death in 1857, Paolina was destined to spend her last days in Pisa, a city that she found as enjoyable as had her brother.

Leopardi dedicated one of his early patriotic poems to his sister, “On the Marriage of his Sister Paolina,” that turned out to be written for an event that never took place. This poem, stern and demanding in tone, and disconsolate with respect to his country’s prospects for achieving its independence, was nonetheless inspired by the example in ancient Roman times of Virginia, who “was killed by her centurion father to save her from the advances of the decimvir Appius Claudius.” Inspired by Alfieri’s tragedy Virginia, “Leopardi made her a heroine who sacrifices herself for her country.”[8] For Leopardi, Paolina’s forthcoming marriage was a pretext for celebrating the martial virtues of ancient Roman womanhood. His sister all but disappears from his paean to this Roman woman whose death, alluded to in the poem’s last three verses, was an event that allowed him to declaim: “So eternal Rome / entombed in heavy sleep / finds life again thanks to a woman’s death.”[9]

It was typical of the young Leopardi, as both scholar and poet, to see his poems as vehicles for unveiling various images and stylistic devices used by his favorite classical poets, in this case Virgil and Horace, and for images borrowed from two contemporary civic-minded Italian poets whom he admired, Alfieri and Foscolo. As a result, poor Paolina suffered the same fate in this poem as she did in her own family life: she was present and appreciated, but also neglected, overlooked, and treated as a pretext for someone else’s ideological purposes.

Her own letters reveal her to be a person for whom friendship meant the world, far more than for most people because of her feelings of isolation and loneliness. For years on end, letters were her one outlet for escaping from what she called “the infernal monotony of her home, where days passed like centuries.”[10] Don Sebastiano Sanchini played a part in one of her closest friendships, with Vittoria Lazzari, of Pesaro; Vittoria was also a relative of the Leopardis, in whose home Sanchini had been a tutor before assuming his duties with the Leopardi family. Another friend was Marianna Brighenti, the daughter of the publisher Pietro Brighenti. With these two women, Paolina often spoke of her readings; her favorite writers of the day were Stendhal, Mme de Staël, Eugène Sue, and Walter Scott. Evidently, she had a taste for adventure and risk-taking. She tried her hand at translating Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, but apparently did not try to have it published.

As far as her political and moral convictions were concerned, Paolina more or less followed her parents’ lead. Although not fanatical like her mother, she leaned heavily on her religious beliefs in times of loss and in situations when her friends needed her for comfort and consolation. She became an expert advisor to the lovelorn, and showed a lively interest in fashion and the latest hairstyles. To Marianna Brighenti she confided her feelings about living in Recanati and sharing a household with her mother:

Among the reasons that have made my life so sad and that have dried up the sources of happiness and vivaciousness, one is living in Recanati, an abominable and hateful place to live; another is having in my mother an ultra-rigorous person, a real excess of Christian perfection, whose severity in all the details of domestic life you can’t imagine. Truly a very good woman and exemplary, she has made for herself rules of austerity that are absolutely impracticable, and has imposed on herself duties toward her children that are not at all suitable to them.[11]

In the early 1830s, Paolina worked closely with her father for the journal La Voce della Ragione, and appears to have made his anti-liberal views her own. She deplored the “excesses” of people whom she labeled “revolutionaries,” responsible, she thought, for all sorts of “craziness.” Writing to her friend Vittoria Lazzari, who was living in Pisa at the time, she said “you need to have been here [in the Marche] to see the crazy things that our liberals have done, our liberators, those who brought us freedom in words, and took it away from us in fact. I think that the Italian revolution, in this part of the boot, has enlightened many, and made them see that there is a big difference between theory and practice, that popular sovereignty is a chimera, a real fairy tale . . .”[12] This was not her first or her last word on current politics; she was quite conscious of class differences and class prejudices in the society she frequented. She viewed the lives of people she lumped together in the categories of “peasants and artisans” as enviable not because of what they contributed to society but rather for their simple-minded imperviousness to the kind of troubling thoughts that kept people of her own class awake at night.

Marriage for a woman such as Paolina was the road to freedom, or at least to a way out of a stifling existence, yet she resisted various other suitors, several from Recanati. She wrote about this question of choice to one of the Brighenti sisters, in August 1832, revealing a notable independence of mind about how she wanted to live her life:

If I am not to have for a husband someone of my social level, who counts the same four-quarters of nobility that I have, he will at least have to be someone who because of his talents, intellect, and actions has made a name for himself, not a person who makes you blush at every moment, each time he speaks. . . . And I know that I have tightened my chains by myself, yet I believe that the time will never come when I will regret my decision, even if I were to remain in chains for my entire life.[13]

The reference to “four quarters of nobility” meant someone all four of whose grandparents were nobles, because this meant that both of her or his parents were pureblooded nobles. Paolina was well aware of social distinctions of this sort, and took them into consideration in her interactions with people. She was at her best when she was concerned with the emotional problems of her friends, whenever they encountered difficulties in their love lives or in their relationships with their parents. On several occasions, she offered them what appears to be sound advice, based on her knowledge of the personalities involved. This was her great strength, and she made good use of it in her private life. If humanism requires that one be actively and constructively engaged in the lives of one’s family and friends, Paolina certainly meets that requirement, despite her stodgy political views.

In view of the hypercritical opinions of women that Leopardi expressed over a period of about twelve years, it comes as a pleasant surprise that in his actual relationships, provided that there was no sexual tension involved, he was able to surmount his misogynistic prejudices.

Two women who played important roles in his life from the mid-1820s on were a mother and daughter from Parma, Antonietta Tommasini and her daughter Adelaide Maestri. Again, evidence of their relationships with him comes entirely from letters. What their correspondence demonstrates is their constant concern for his health and well-being, and their generosity in offering him the hospitality of their homes and availability for whatever requests he made of them, whether practical or intellectual in nature. They were his main sources of information on the politics of the Duchy of Parma, during a tumultuous time. In 1829, through the Maestri family, he received an offer of a chair in “natural history” for which he felt unqualified and therefore turned down. But this exemplified Adelaide’s vigilance when his interests were at stake. Like her mother, she had met Leopardi at a party in Florence, after which they made him their friend and beneficiary of numerous favors both large and small.

In 1832, Leopardi spent considerable time drafting a “preamble” to a journal that he, together with Antonio Ranieri and several others, planned to publish in Florence and in Parma. Their tentative name for the journal was Lo Spettatore Fiorentino. It never materialized, for political reasons, and it was on this occasion that both Antonietta and Adelaide did their best to help overturn a decision taken by the Grand Duchy of Parma to refuse a permit to publish the journal. Something of the closeness and confidence that Leopardi felt for Adelaide emerges from a letter he sent to her in April 1829, when he was living in Recanati and had not yet worked out a plan for moving to Florence. “If fortune wants me to live in this exile, as I have lived for most of my life,” he said, “I console myself with the memory of you, and with the thought of your friendship.”[14] This was not a perfunctory remark on Leopardi’s part. It was another in a long series of occasions when he made it clear to those who were closest to him that their friendship was what gave him strength to go on living.

In January 1829 Leopardi wrote to Antonietta and her husband Giacomo, who had just finished a stint of teaching in Bologna, to thank them for their invitation to live with them in Parma that he was about to accept, because of his unhappiness in Recanati. But as soon as he learned that he would after all be able to live in Florence, he refused their offer. Antonietta was a scholar and writer who had recently completed a book of pensieri (thoughts) similar in format to Leopardi’s own writings with the same title. The book went through three editions in several months. Despite her fragile health, she was an energetic person, with whom Leopardi had much in common. She was the prime mover behind the effort to obtain a professorship for Leopardi in “natural history” that he considered for a short time.

Adelaide Maestri took refuge in her friendship with Leopardi from gloomy feelings about the possibility of a breakthrough in current politics that might give Italians a chance to gain a greater measure of political independence. In the absence of such hopes, quite possibly influenced to some degree by Leopardi’s own deep skepticism, she told him in a letter of November 16, 1831 that she “envied the sheet of stationery she was writing on” because it would soon be in Leopardi’s hands. She assured him that her affection for him would never end, that it would endure for as long as she lived. “So, dear friend, let’s maintain our friendship, the only comfort in this life, that at this point can be considered devoid of that little amount of good that hope brings with it.”[15]

Adelaide knew that Leopardi would understand that underlying her sadness was her despair about the possibility that a decisive political change for the better would take place in Italy. There was an implicit political solidarity as well as personal friendship in her letter.

At this time, Leopardi complained frequently about the unreliability and treachery of the postal service, as he had done six years earlier, when he told his sister that his letters “were subject to a thousand miseries of censorship.”[16] It was well known that the letters of anyone under suspicion in the Duchy of Florence and the Duchy of Parma were subject to random searches by the political police. In March 1834, it was Adelaide who informed Leopardi, then living in Naples, of the recent arrest and imprisonment of his mentor Pietro Giordani. The immediate cause of his arrest, she explained, was an “overbearing letter that Giordani had written to Baron Vincenzo Mistrali,” who was regarded as the real, although not titular, head of the ducal government. Giordani was angry about the seizure of a pamphlet he had written that had been forwarded to the authorities in Parma from Milan. It was a complicated case, which Adelaide reported in great detail. In the previous January, Giordani had written another fiery letter to a police inspector named Gassalli in which he described the assassination a short time earlier of the Chief of Police, Edoardo Sartorio, with a tone that Adelaide described as “voluptuously colorful.” This had induced Gassalli to suspect him of complicity in the crime. But the police were unable to back up their suspicions with sufficient evidence, and Giordani was released from prison after three months. Adelaide noted that Giordani had defended himself extremely well in court.

Living in Naples after early October 1833 created a break in regular communication between Leopardi and his friends in central and north Italy. Adelaide alluded to this in what was probably one of her last letters to him, on February 20, 1836. As she had done in the preceding six to seven years, she wanted him to know how much he was in her thoughts. “Who can know Leopardi,” she said, “and not love him, and remember him for the rest of her life? I have to fear, rather, knowing that I am nothing in this world, being forgotten by you.” A sign of the times was her feeling that what was being thought and written in Naples would never reach her in Parma, there being many barriers to free exchange of ideas between one regime and another in the patchwork of geopolitical entities that made up the Italian peninsula.

Apart from Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti and Teresa Carniani Malvezzi, whose relationships with Leopardi were discussed in previous chapters, the only other woman with whom Leopardi had significant interaction was Carlotta Medici-Lenzoni. In a letter to de Sinner at the end of June 1831, he spoke of her in flattering terms. He had given her a package of books to deliver to de Sinner in Paris, so that his letter to his friend was meant to be a kind of introduction to her. “Carlotta Lenzoni born Medici, a lady who belongs to the first nobility of Florence, has a still greater merit, which is that she loves literature and the arts more than Italian ladies usually do.”[17] He went on to describe the many social occasions at her home in Florence that he had attended, several times a week, where “one finds the most distinguished people in the city.” In sum, Carlotta was a central figure in the world of Florentine salons.

Carlotta appears to have been Leopardi’s most cosmopolitan female friend in Florence. She traveled often, had many strategically placed friends, and was up to date about the latest European novels. In a letter of November 10, 1831, another Carlotta, Charlotte Bonaparte, told Leopardi, who was in Rome at the time, that among the prominent people she was seeing in Florence was Carlotta Lenzoni, who had told her that “she was reading Clarisse, and found it rather boring.”

What with the Bonapartes and the Medicis, Leopardi could consider himself a real man of the world, a distinction that did not entirely displease him. This, too, was a side of his personality that needs to be seen in its proper context, as an aspect of the life of a man born to privilege who felt thoroughly at ease in the company of duchesses, knights, and barons.

NOTES

1. Epistolario (Moroncini), Volume 5, 223–24.

2. Lettere inedite di Paolina Leopardi (Ferretti), 50.

3. Ibid., 29, n. 5, and 154.

4. Citati, 297.

5. Epistolario (Moroncini), Volume 3, 232–33.

6. Epistolario (Moroncini), Volume 4, 45–46.

7. Paolina mia—lettere alla sorella, introduction by Mariella Muscariello, 63.