Whilst in Florence Leopardi led a busy social life. This primarily through Gian Pietro Vieusseux (1779-1863), an intellectual from Geneva the founder of the Gabinetto Scientifico-Letterario in 1819 and the “Antologia” or “Anthology” in 1821, the magazine that became an authoritative voice of moderate and progressive liberalism. Leopardi had come into contact with him in 1824, thanks to Giordani, for the very purpose of working for the magazine (but the only things published were three Operettas, in January 1826). Having reached Florence in June 1827, at Vieusseux’s Gabinetto he met many intellectuals close to the “Antologia’s” leanings: among them, Giuseppe Montani, Giovan Battista Niccolini, Niccolò Tommaseo, and those more intimate friends: over and above the Swiss Louis de Sinner, the general and historian Pietro Colletta (1775-1831) and Gino Capponi (1792-1876).
Colletta was he who offered Leopardi (after the Operette morali/Moral Operettas failed to win a prize of one thousand scudos from the Accademia della Crusca in 1828) a year long subsidy from the “Tuscan friends”, thanks to which he was able to leave Recanati.
Capponi, a pedagogue and a historian, was to become the dedicatory for the Palinodia, the Canto in which Leopardi expresses his total disapproval for the ideology of the Florentine liberals. By a quirk of fate, in fact, in Florence Leopardi was able to take advantage of a broad circle of friends, but at the same time had the demonstration of the fact that the ideological divide that separated him from them was ever wider. And so, to privately stated expressions of affection and gratitude (in many letters) and publicly (the dedicatory to the Canti of 1831: To my Tuscan Friends), Leopardi juxtaposed a series of works in which he painfully denounced the myths of “progress”, of “optimism” and of “liberalism”, that is to say the key concepts on which was based the plan for reformation of the “Antologia”: Tristano, Paralipomeni, Palinodia.
The "friends from Tuscany"
