Pietro Giordani
Pietro Giordani (Piacenza 1774-Parma 1848), a Benedictine monk from 1797 to 1800, a classicist and man of letters, erudite, polemist, was co-director of the “Biblioteca Italiana” and collaborated with Vieusseux’s “Anthology”; he suffered exile and was also imprisoned, in 1834, for his liberal ideas.
Leopardi, having sent in February 1817 three copies of the translation of the Aeneid to the great classicists Mai, Monti and Giordani, received replies of circumstance from the first two, but from Giordani a letter in which he declared himself available for a meeting: this was the beginning of a splendid epistolary relationship, very intense above all between 1817 and 1821. The famous man of letters, showing himself to have an extraordinary sixth sense, immediately understood the exceptional qualities of his young correspondent: “I have come to firmly believe in my heart that you must be (and you alone, to my knowledge, can be) the perfect Italian writer, that in my soul I had conceived a long while ago” (letter 24th July 1817).
Leopardi had finally found in Giordani a master and a confidant; from him he received news, advice and encouragement, and to him he opened his soul in torrential letters, writing of his life, his studies and plans, of his desire for literary glory. Giordani’s influence on the young Leopardi proved decisive also from an ethical and civil point of view: it is not by chance that after the monk from Piacenza had visited Recanati (between 16th and 21st September 1818) Leopardi composed his “patriotic” All’Italia/To Italy and Sul monumento di Dante/Upon Dante’s Monument.
Also in later years Giordani continued to be a point of reference for Leopardi: among other things, it was the monk who in 1824 suggested he should contact Vieusseux (and to present in the “Anthology” three Operettas in 1826), and it was he who was the go-between for many Bolognese friendships and also Florentine.
After Leopardi’s death, in 1844 Giordani wrote the epigraph for Leopardi’s tomb in the church of San Vitale, and above all in 1845 oversaw the third volume (youthful philological writings) for the Le Monnier edition of the Opere, writing a very important Proem.
