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This chapter examines Giacomo Leopardi's own imitation of Petrarch. It describes Leopardi's major engagement with Petrarch including his commentary on the Canzoniere and explains the similarities and differences between his All sua donna and Petrarch's Chiare, fresche e dolci acque. It suggests that the most striking similarity between the two poets is that they both are concerned with illusions without self-delusion.

The chapter begins with a definition of deixis and its poetic uses, which are then developed with regard to Sereni through a comparative reading of poems from his first and third collections, Frontiera [Frontier] and Gli strumenti umani [The Human Implements]. As Sereni’s dialogue with Giacomo Leopardi reveals, he recognizes the value of deixis as a poetic trope that ideally enables the poet to conjure presence out of absence and anchor the subject at the centre of its universe. However increasingly unable to achieve those ends himself, Sereni’s recurrent use of deictic reference—in the form of spatio-temporal coordinates, demonstratives, and personal pronouns—attests instead to his diminishing hold over the textual landscape, his growing struggle to appropriate it, and the dispossession of self and space that ensues.

This chapter moves away from Rossini’s operas and toward the world in which they first appeared. Historians agree on the cataclysmic impact that the arrival of Napoleon’s armies had on all spheres of human activity in the Italian peninsula: it meant nothing less than the arrival of modernity. The result was confusion, bewilderment, shock. The Italy in which Rossini’s operas emerged can be best described with the word “trauma.” The nature and consequences of this trauma are explored through the writings of two uncompromising interpreters of Italy’s first collision with modernity, Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi. For Foscolo and Leopardi reality had ceased to make sense for modern Italians: time and space, history and geography had become undecipherable, unknowable dimensions for a subject who had lost all notions of itself as a separate and unified entity. According to Leopardi, Italians lacked the tools to which other peoples turned to deal with this situation—the novel, for example. They instead embraced spectacle: promenading in public, religious ceremonies, and theatrical entertainments. Theatricality became the defining feature of modern Italian society, and one of the clearest symptoms of its failure to work through the trauma of its encounter with modernity.

London in 1824 was a city obsessed with the Italian improvising poets known as improvvisatori. Periodical accounts, reviews, and histories of poetic improvisation abounded, while the popularity of Madame de Staël’s fictional improviser Corinne opened up new possibilities for women authors. Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) was only the latest to follow Corinne’s lead, publishing her long poem “The Improvisatrice” that year. Not only is her protagonist clearly based on Staël’s Corinne, but she also revisits that most ancient improvvisatrice, Sappho. By 1825, when Tommaso Sgricci himself arrived in London, his decision to recite from already published transcriptions rather than perform extempore might suggest that improvisation had been thoroughly absorbed into print culture, its spontaneous effusions hardened into fixed texts. This chapter argues, however, that printed evocations of poetic improvisation testify to the continued resonance of the improviser’s voice. The repercussions of this (sometimes imagined) sound carried not just across media (live recitation, transcriptions, published poems) but across geographical and gendered boundaries. Landon’s poem reads quite differently placed next to another “remediation” of the improviser’s voice: Giacomo Leopardi’s “Ultimo canto di Saffo” (1822). Both works prompt us to understand the textualization of improvised poetry as a risky, incomplete, and impermanent undertaking.

This chapter’s exploration of Giacomo Leopardi’s translation of the Aeneid tackles one of the most debated dilemmas in translation practice: whether or not one has to be a poet in order to translate poetry. Having undertaken the daunting task of translating the Aeneid, Leopardi shows himself to be a good philologist and, at the same time, also comes into his own poetic vocation as his translation progresses. The result of his translation is an impressive achievement, Scafoglio argues, a work that combines literary faithfulness to the original with the rendering of the expressive musicality and elusive fascination of Virgilian verse in Italian.

This chapter focuses on the ‘rediscovery’ of Virgil’s tomb in the Renaissance, exploring its position in the cultures of scholarship, travel, and leisure. Clusters of poets’ graves sprang up around the so-called ‘tomb of Virgil’ in Piedigrotta near Naples, re-establishing it as a site of literary succession and inspiration; the tomb played a central role in the construction of Neapolitan urban identity and was a popular site for early modern travel and leisure, a role it still retains today. Generations of visitors to the tomb have felt a strong personal connection to the poet, a connection they have chosen to mark by leaving graffiti or notes at the tomb, by taking away laurel leaves, and by reciting and producing poetry at the site.

This chapter explores Ortese’s early texts, which reveal Ortese’s writing originating from loss, such as autobiographical bereavement, separation, and melancholy. The elegy ‘Manuele’ (1933) and the short stories ‘Pellerossa’ and ‘Il capitano’ (from Angelici dolori, 1937) are autobiographical texts centred around the brother figura, as an emblem of a deep-rooted familial bond, which is severed in conjunction with the end of childhood and youth. ‘La cura’ (1942) broadens the spectrum of the short-story genre in its depiction of melancholy within a tale on love and abandonment. As well as presenting the early shaping of central themes and recurring topoi, the chapter foregrounds Ortese’s quotations from and allusions to Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi, Pascoli, D’Annunzio, Heinrich Heine, and draws parallels with Lamarque and Svevo. The analysis engages with cultural, anthropological, and psychoanalytical studies of mourning and melancholy (Freud, Kristeva, Klein, De Martino, Borgna)

Drawing on theories of autobiography, this chapter begins by investigating Ortese’s manipulation of the genre in her major novel Il porto di Toledo (1975), which revisits and incorporates Ortese’s early poems and stories and the author’s growing up in the transfigured town of Naples–Toledo. It particularly focuses on how the themes of bereavement, youth, love, war, and writing are shaped in her Bildungsroman through a complex and variegated intertextual dialogue with quotations from and allusions to authors from the Italian and European tradition, particularly Leopardi, Valéry, Villalón, Dumas, Petrarch, Conrad, and paintings by El Greco. First, the analysis focuses on the novel’s structure, linguistic practice, and hispanization. Then it explores the debt to Leopardi in Ortese’s shaping of the themes of loss of youth, transience and melancholy, identity, mourning, and the initiation to writing as a response to loss

This chapter explores ‘Il Monaciello di Napoli’ (1940), ‘Folletto a Genova’ (1984) and Il cardillo addolorato (1993), texts centred around an elf character, sharing many features with the fairy-tale genre. After discussing Ortese’s adaptation of the fairy-tale genre, it assesses her debt to traditional European and Italian folklore and literature, and explores the nature of storytelling, the grandmother figure, fantasy elements, themes of loss, childhood, modernity, guilt, suffering, and atonement, centred around the elf as a privileged emblem for the representation of the vulnerable and suffering Other. Intertextual analysis shows Ortese’s debt to Leopardi’s Canti in the construction of the theme of passing youth, to Collodi’s Pinocchio, and to Provençal poetry, while Il cardillo addolorato broadens the significance of the elf as representing underprivileged beings suffering marginalization from society and history, whose rights and existence are crushed by modernity

Unconstrained by the inhibiting logic of realist fiction, nineteenth-century poetry—and especially Romantic poetry—routinely concerns itself with distant cultures and questions of empire. In lyric poetry, this predilection reverses the classical separation of the form from public affairs. Though the connection between literature and empire is not surprisingly strongest in England and France, it is a continent-wide phenomenon that assumes distinctive guises outside the two great metropolitan powers. One is the experience of victimization—oppression by another European power. The other is a tendency toward abstraction: if one’s country lacks colonial possessions, the turn to non-European civilization aids in reflection on apparently unrelated issues. These concerns are evident across Europe but especially in the poetry of Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Leopardi.

Giacomo Leopardi, a major Italian poet of the nineteenth century, was also an expert in evil to whom Schopenhauer referred as a “spiritual brother.” Leopardi wrote: “Everything is evil. That is to say, everything that is, is evil; that each thing exists is an evil; each thing exists only for an evil end; existence is an evil.” These and other thoughts are collected in the Zibaldone, a massive collage of heterogeneous writings published posthumously. Leopardi’s pessimism assumes a polished form in his literary writings, such as Dialogue between Nature and an Islander (1824)—an invective against nature and the suffering of creatures within it. In his last lyric, Broom, or the flower of the desert (1836), Leopardi points to the redeeming power of poetry and to human solidarity as placing at least temporary limits on the scope of evil.