Letters

Leopardi has left us many letters, over nine hundred, addressed to about one hundred recipients, especially as of 1816. They are very important from a documentary point of view, to know about his trips, his friendships, his plans; but they are also important as an insight into his thoughts, his soul and his cultural considerations, given that in writing to his closest friends Leopardi abandoned his customary self-control.

Furthermore, even if they do not have a value in the sense of a literary project, Leopardi’s letters can be read as an autonomous work, thanks to the extraordinary value of these pieces of private prose, some of which can indeed compete with his major works (amongst the most notable, the letters to his father dated July 1819, about his planned flight from Recanati, or the letter to his brother Carlo from Rome dated 20 February 1823, on Tasso’s burial place).

Various ways of reading the letters have been proposed. One approach is “thematic”: for example the letters about the body and illness, or those about his judgements on literature; another “chronological”: for example the letter about the Roman period, or the Period in Pisa; another based on the “recipients”: for example the abundant correspondence with Giordani, 1817-21, which opened out Leopardi’s cultural horizon, or with his brother, based upon affectionate exchanges (“Love me, by God. I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life”, he wrote 25 November 1822 from Rome), and above all with his father, the largest and most suffered. It should lastly be noted that he rarely talks about his creative activity.

The edition that is considered the point of reference is the one by Franco Brioschi and Patrizia Landi (2 voll., Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 1998).