This Canzone is the “twin” of All’Italia (with which it shares its “precedents”), it was composed in Recanati between September and October 1818, and published up till the edition of the Canti of 1831 with the title che si prepara: it was indeed prompted by a manifesto of July 1818 in which a monument to Dante was proposed, then uncovered in 1830 (and the honour attributed to a great man of the past is an occasion for Leopardi to deplore the squalid present: “O Italy, you should have the heart to praise your past; as today / your lands are barren of glory,/and there is thus nothing to be praised”, vv. 7-10).
In the Canzone, which has a very laborious style, Leopardi laments, as in the preceding Canzone, the fate of Italy under foreign dominance:
Perché venimmo a sì perversi tempi?
perché il nascer ne desti o perché prima
non ne desti il morire,
acerbo fato?
...
Qui l’ira al cuor, qui la pietade abbonda:
pugnò, cadde gran parte anche di noi:
ma per la moribonda
Italia no; per li tiranni suoi. (vv. 120-4, 133-6)
Why have such perverse times befallen us? Why are we born to such bitter fate? ... Here both anger and pity abound: we fought and many of us fell, yet not for our moribund Italy but for its tyrants.
And, as in the preceding Canzone, Leopardi deplores the fate of young Italians who died in the frozen Russian step during the Napoleonic campaign:
Morian per le rutene (= “russe”)
squallide piagge, ahi d’altra morte degni,
gl’itali prodi; e lor fea l’aere e il cielo
e gli uomini e le belve immensa guerra.
Cadeano a squadre a squadre
semivestiti, maceri e cruenti,
ed era letto agli egri (= “ammalati”) corpi il gelo.
Allor, quando traevan l’ultime pene,
membrando questa desiata madre,
diceano: on non le nubi e non i venti,
ma ne spegnesse il ferro, e per tuo bene,
o patria nostra. Ecco da te rimoti,
quando più bella a noi l’età sorride,
a tutto il mondo ignoti,
moriam per quella gente che t’uccide. (vv. 139-53)
Sopra il monumento di Dante che si preparava in Firenze
