The Discorso sugli Italiani or Speech on Italians was composed in Recanati probably between the spring and the summer of 1824, when his trip to Rome was still very much alive in Leopardi’s mind, following a proposal from Vieusseux to collaborate with the “Antologia”, which is in the letters of January-March of that year. The work was however never finished, and was not published until 1906.
This Discorso, a fundamental work in Leopardi’s philosophical and political reflections (the diagnosis of which on Italian anthropology is still today valid), is part of that minor literary genre that describes national characteristics: the selfsame Leopardi cites as “precedents” the epistolary novel Corinne ou l’Italie by M.me de Staël (1807) and the writings of Giuseppe Baretti.
The work is divided into five parts, the first dedicated to an introduction in which the need for a new description of the customs of the Italians is motivated; the second to an analysis of the particular aspects that characterise Italian society; the third to a comparison between the Italian situation and that of other European nations, and an invective against the exaltation of medieval times; the fourth to individualism (“Customs and usage in Italy generally boil down to this, that each follows his own usage and customs, whatever they might be”), and to the difference in customs between cities and the provinces and the need to promote civilization “as a remedy for itself” (this due to the paradoxical situation Italy was in, in that it was too little civilized to be able to have the benefit of civilization, like France and Germany and England; but too civilized to be able to still benefit from a state of nature, such as Spain and Portugal and Poland and Russia); the fifth and last to the effects of climate on national character an to the “decisive and visible superiority that northerly nations have over southerly ones”.
The edition that is the point of reference is by Marco Dondero (Les Belles Lettres, Paris 2003, with an introduction by Novella Bellucci).
Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’Italiani
