Love

The stronger they were the less requited were Leopardi’s loves: for Geltrude Cassi, for Teresa Fattorini, and for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti. Luckily for readers, Leopardi managed to transpose his private passions into poems of a universal value (from A Silvia to the Ricordanze and the “Aspasia cycle”), and in other works (suffice it to recall the Storia del genere umano/History of mankind in the Operette, or Pensiero LXXXII.

His reflections in the Zibaldone privilege love’s faculty to “elevate” the human soul:

“I have never experienced a thought that could numb the soul so potently from all that which surrounds it such as love”; “Love is life and the vivifying principle of nature” [59] – “As with love so is hate principally addressed at our fellows” [210-1] – “To see die a loved one, is far less lacerating than to see them fade away and transform themselves in body and soul” [479-80] – “He who does not have much and constant esteem of himself, is incapable of true love” [2923] – it is clothes that, having made men and women mysterious the ones for the others, have superimposed illusions and dreams to the sensuality of love [3302-10] – love is the “sweetest, dearest, most human, most potent, most universal of passions” [3611] – love is a natural passion, but the progressive spiritualization of things human has made it become “sentimental” [3909-20] – “A woman of 20, 25 or 30 years of age ... is better suited to inspire, and the more maintain, a passion. ... but truly a young girl aged 16 to 18 has in her face, in the way she moves, in her voice, gestures etc. an I don’t know what of divine, which nothing can equal. ... I know no thing that more than this is capable of elevating the soul ... All this, ... without we falling in love, that is to say without being moved by the desire  to possess that object” [4310-1] –love often generates “boredom, nausea, aversion towards one’s lover” [4501].