Giacomo Leopardi – 19th-century Italian poet and philosopher, author of Canti and Operette morali, emblem of European pessimism. His poetry fused classical themes with romantic melancholy, while his thought explored illusion, solitude, and the beauty of nature. He shaped Italian letters, remembered as a tragic genius.
📖 As a child, Leopardi spent years in his father’s library, immersed in the classics. 📚 By his teens, he was translating Greek and Latin poets. 💔 Lifelong illnesses of the spine and eyes deepened his melancholy outlook. 🖋 His philosophy blended materialism with a poetic sense of nature. 🌌 His poem L’infinito captures infinity through the image of a hillside view. 🎓 Some contemporaries called him the “Italian Hamlet” for his tragic thought. 🏛 In the 20th century, his work fed into Italian existentialism. ✨ His hometown Recanati hosts a Leopardi museum visited by poetry lovers. 😂 Fun fact: in letters he joked he knew all languages “except the language of happiness.”