Leopardi stayed in Florence from June to November 1827; then, having spent the winter in Pisa, he went back in June 1828 and stayed there till November. After “sixteen months of horrid nights” at Recanati, he went back to Florence in May 1830 and remained there till September 1833 (but for the months of his stay in Rome with Antonio Ranieri, from October 1831 to March 1832).
Florence (a city that in his letters he declares he does not love, but in which he spent a lot of time) was the city in which Leopardi was socially most active, above all in the circle of friends of Gian Pietro Vieusseux (with whom he had corresponded since 1824) and of his “Anthology”: over and above Manzoni and Stendhal he met the group of future “Tuscan friends” and Louis de Sinner, and also frequented the homes of Carlotta Lenzoni and Charlotte Bonaparte. And in June 1828 he met the friend with whom as of September 1830 he was to become inseparable: the Neapolitan exile Antonio Ranieri.
But above all Florence was where he met Fanny Targioni Tozzetti, the woman for whom he felt the strongest passion of his life, the “Aspasia” to whom he dedicated the Canti that gave birth to his “new poetics” (Walter Binni): Consalvo, Il pensiero dominante/Dominant Thought, Amore e Morte/Love and Death, A se stesso/To Himself and Aspasia (these last two probably composed in Naples).
His creative activity whilst in Florence was truly rich: over and above the Canti of Florentine love, in 1832 Leopardi composed the last two Operettas, Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere/Dialogue between an almanac seller and a passer by and Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico/Dialogue between Tristan and a friend (included in the Piatti edition, Florence 1834), he planned (in substantial juxtaposition to the “Anthology”) the paper “Lo Spettatore fiorentino”/Florentine Spectator, for which he wrote an important Preamble, and probably began work on the Pensieri/Thoughts.
And of course, in Florence in 1831, Piatti published the first edition of his Canti, accompanied by the dedicatory Agli amici suoi di Toscana/To my Tuscan friends (and one of these, Giuseppe Montani, wrote an excellent review for the “Anthology”).
Florence
