Ad Angelo Mai, quand’ebbe trovato i libri di Cicerone della Repubblica
Canzone composed at Recanati in January 1820, in “10 or 12 days”, and published in the Bologna 1820 edition, dedicated to Leonardo Trissino (poi modified in the Bologna 1824 edition).
Despite the fact that when in 1822 he was given the possibility of reading Cicero’s De re publica, discovered by Angelo Mai, the Prefect of the Vatican Library, Leopardi found it disappointing (he however published in the Roman “Effemeridi letterarie” of 1822 the philological article Notae in Ciceronis de Re Publica), the news of its discovery did fill him with enthusiasm, giving him the inspiration for this Canzone about Angelo Mai’s discovery. Here Leopardi expressed the highest of his verses of patriotic poetry, in particular in the “gallery” of great Italians (Dante, Columbus, Ariosto, Tasso, Alfieri) who had been blessed with the good fortune of not having been born in a “dead century, upon which lays / the fog of tediousness” (vv. 4-5).
The political and civil value of his verses is underlined by Leopardi in a letter to Pietro Brighenti dated 20 April 1820, in which on the subject of this Canzone he wrote:
Mio padre non s’immagina che vi sia qualcuno che da tutti i soggetti sa tratte occasione di parlar di quello che più gl’importa, e non sospetta punto che sotto quel titolo si nasconda una Canzone piena d’orribile fanatismo.
My father does not imagine that there can exist someone who can from all subjects draw occasion for talking about that which most interests him, and does not at all suspect that in the title is hidden a Canzone full of horrendous fanaticism.
To the civil theme are also added other themes dear to Leopardi: above all the fact that one cannot reconcile knowledge with happiness, expressed in the famous lines on Columbus (vv. 76-90):
Ma tua vita era allor con gli astri e il mare,
ligure ardita prole,
quand’oltre alle colonne, ed oltre ai liti
cui strider l’onde all’attuffar del sole
parve udir su la sera, agl’infiniti
flutti commesso (= “affidato”), ritrovasti il raggio
del Sol caduto, ...
... Ahi ahi, ma conosciuto il mondo
non cresce, anzi si scema, e assai più vasto
l’etra (= “aria”) sonante e l’alma terra e il mare
al fanciullin, che non al saggio, appare. (vv. 76-82, 87-90)
