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This essay examines Giacomo Leopardi’s reflections on the future in the Zibaldone, his encyclopedic miscellany of notes and thoughts. Leopardi (1798-1837) is one of Europe’s greatest poets and ...thinkers, yet his reception outside of Italy has been relatively limited. The article aims to situate Leopardi’s ideas in the context of modern European thought and to frame his vision of futurity by examining a series of interconnected issues: the question of the modern individual’s experience of time and relationship with the future; the nature of society’s responsibility toward the generations to come; and the question of literature’s engagement with future readers. It shows how Leopardi’s philosophy of the future provided both a critique of European modernity and a response to its challenges. It also draws out the parallel issue of an author’s contemporaneity, that is her capacity to belong to her period and, at the same time, to transcend it. Thus, while resituating Leopardi’s temporal reflection within the epochal changes that took place between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the article also attempts to decouple the texts and their message from their historical period, in order to investigate Leopardi’s relevance beyond the limits of his present.
Pain is a central and recurring theme in Leopardi's theory. The poet analyzes its causes, dynamisms and remedys. In order to face pain, Leopardi suggests patience, habit, passing of time and, in ...particular, illusions. Leopardi's theory of pain is closely connected with his pedagogy of savoir vivre.
There is an eighteenth century collection of letters among sources of Leopardi's pedagogy. In March 1827 Leopardi reads Letters to His Son, composed by Lord Chesterfield, an English writer and ...politician, for his son Philip, in order to educate him to live in society and to make his own way in the world. This pedagogic lecture influences some of Leopardi's one hundred and eleven Pensieri. Also Leopardi's Pensieri is a practical pedagogic work, written to educate youth to savoir-vivre.
A macroscopic lithological study and physical (hardness, size, weight) investigations, coupled with laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) chemical analyses of three ...egg- and one pear-shaped polished black stones, exposed in the library of the child home of the famous poet Giacomo Leopardi, at Recanati (Italy), were carried out. They are characterized by different sizes: two with the same weight of 16.9 kg and the two smaller ones of 5.6 kg each, corresponding to multiples of standard roman weights (
and
). These features and the presence of some grooves on the rock artefacts, probably for grappling hooks, suggest an original use as counterweight for the four black stones herein classified as amphibole-bearing serpentinites whose lithologies are far away from Recanati (probably coming from geological outcrops in Tuscany). The four serpentinite stones closely match with the so-called
used in antiquity by the Romans as counterweights. Due to the presence of lead rings or iron hooks in these stones,
were also used for martyrdoms during the persecution of Christians in the Roman period, attached to the necks of martyrs that were then thrown in the wells or attached to the ankles of hanging bodies. This is the reason why these stones are also known as
, venerated with the relative martyrs, in several churches of Rome. The four black stones investigated probably arrived at Recanati from Rome after the middle of the 19th century. In the past, Christians also called
the "devil's stones" (
). This could also be the reason for the popular belief that black stones cannot be touched by people, except those of the Leopardi dynasty. This work contributes to the cultural heritage of Leopardi's child home, as the four black stones had never been investigated.
Leopardi ascribes great importance to youth, of which he points out the enthusiasm, the intense wish to live that finds, however, an outlet with difficulty, rising unhappiness. Leopardi's sad, ...personal life is very evident inside his theory. Leopardi exhorts Italian young people to national redemption by his poetry and, moreover, he theorizes a social education for real life of the naive, inexpert young man.