Canzone entitled Village Saturday composed in Recanati at the end of September 1829 and first published in the Florence 1831, it constitutes a “diptych” with the preceding La quiete dopo la tempesta/Calm after the tempest.
Also in the Sabato, as in the Quiete, the theme of pleasure is central: impossible in the present, and always and only imagined in the future. Leopardi’s reflections on the subject are profound, and to be found in many of his works, especially in the Operette morali/Moral Operettas and the Zibaldone (for example in the passage of 20 January 1821: “Human pleasure ... one can say is always future, it is not if not future, it consists only in future. The act of pleasure is not given. I hope a pleasure; and this hope in very many cases is called pleasure”, 532).
This Canto however expresses in a (also stylistically) “lighter” form this bitter consideration of Leopardi’s: both thanks to the “idyllic” situation and the characters, derived from the experience of life at Recanati, with which the poem starts (the “young lass” with her “little bunch of roses and violets”, the “old lady” who “whiles away the time in gossip”, the “kids” that shout “in a gang in the square”, “the farm labourer”, and the “wood merchant, who watches over his shop / and frets away at getting his task done / before the break of day”, vv. 1-37): characters that represent various ways of enjoying the wait for the arrival of a day’s holiday, and which will on the day instead feel pain in thinking about the following day’s labours; as well as thanks to the closing apostrophe to the “jocose young boy”, in which Leopardi intuits a parallel between the Saturday, which precedes the day of holiday, and youth, which precedes adult life – but wishes to save the “young boy” from an understanding of the pain that awaits him:
Garzoncello scherzoso,
cotesta età fiorita
è come un giorno d’allegrezza pieno,
giorno chiaro, sereno,
che precorre alla festa di tua vita.
Godi, fanciullo mio; stato soave,
stagion lieta è cotesta.
Altro dirti non vo’; ma la tua festa,
ch’anco tardi a venir non ti sia grave. (vv. 43-51)
Il sabato del villaggio
