Naples
Leopardi reached Naples, with Ranieri, on 2nd October 1833. To start with, he seemed to enjoy his stay; but after just over a year he changed opinion drastically: “I cannot any longer suffer this semi-barbarian and semi-African place, where I live in perfect isolation from one and all” (letter to his father, 27th November 1834).
The key word to Leopardi’s condition in Naples was indeed “isolation”: Leopardi immediately entered into contrast with the cultural circles of the city, centred upon the paper published by Giuseppe Ricciardi (with Saverio Baldacchini and Raffaele Liberatore)”The progress of the Sciences, Letters and the Arts”, founded in March 1832 and of Catholic-Liberal inspiration. Over and above being attacked by this paper’s journalist, Leopardi had to suffer Bourbonic censorship: in 1835 a publication of his works, due to be published in six volumes by the publisher Saverio Starita, was suspended after the second volume (the only works to go to press were the Canti and the first tome of the Operette: “my philosophy displeased the priests, who here and everywhere else in the world, under one label or another, can still today and will in future continue to do all”, he wrote to Sinner on 22nd December 1836).
To the hostility of the city Leopardi reacted with his poetry; indeed, it seems that the city’s animosity towards him acted as a catalyst for his energies: it is there that he wrote some of his most taxing works, lofty examples of his materialism and of his rejection both of any illusory consolation beyond death and any project of future social palingenesis: over and above the sepolcrali and Aspasia, the Pensieri/Thoughts, the Paralipomeni, the Palinodia and the ferocious anti-Neapolitan satire I nuovi credenti/The New Believers.
As of May 1835, with ever growing health and economic problems, he shared his time (always with Ranieri and his sister Paolina) between the house at Vico Pero in Naples and Villa Ferrigni on the slopes of the Vesuvius, near Torre del Greco (where he wrote La ginestra and Il tramonto della luna/The Setting of the Moon). And it was in Vico Pero that he died, during a cholera epidemic, on 14th June 1837.
