Monaldo Leopardi
Monaldo, Giacomo’s father, was born at Recanati in 1776, and died there in 1847. Having married Adelaide Antici in 1797, he in 1802 ceded her the administration of the family patrimony, limiting his authority to the palace Library, which is where young Giacomo acquired his learning.
He adored studying, and wrote many works, of an erudite or polemic or political nature: some remained manuscripts (such as the Annali della città di Recanati, and the Autobiografia), others were instead published, and did not indeed go unnoticed, quite the contrary: his best known work, the Dialoghetti sulle materie correnti nell’anno 1831 (Nobili, Pesaro 1831), a right and proper concentration of reactionary ideas, antidemocratic and ultra-legitimist, met with considerable public success, and was translated into several other languages (many attributed it to Giacomo, who published a denial in the “Antologia” and in the “Diario di Roma”; as he wrote to his cousin Giuseppe Melchiorri on 15th May 1832: “I am fed up, I really am fed up. I no longer want to appear with this stain on my face, of having fathered that infamous, most infamous, villainous book ... those filthy, fanatical dialogacci”). Another well-known editorial enterprise by Monaldo (in this occasion helped by Paolina) was the editing of the paper “La Voce della Ragione” (The Voice of Reason), violently anti-revolutionary, published from 1832 to 1835 and suppressed by order of the Roman Curia.
His relationship with Giacomo, of which we have testimony in the epistolario, was profound but suffered, as is inevitable in an encounter, albeit bound by reciprocal affection, between two diametrically opposed temperaments with a completely different conception of life (a distraught, pitiless accusation, is in the letter that Giacomo left Monaldo when he planned to flee from Recanati, in July 1819). We cannot here but recall the autobiographical note in Pensiero II: “Scorri le vite degli uomini illustri ... troverai a gran fatica pochissimi veramente grandi, ai quali non sia mancato il padre nella prima età” (Look at the lives of illustrious men ... you will with a struggle find very few who did not lose their father in tender age).
