In Leopardi’s creative work, something quite extraordinary is the passage in the Storia del genere umano in which to “punish perpetually the human race, condemning it for all future ages to a misery much worse than all those past”, Jove sends Truth to Earth, who destroys the illusions that made happy the lives of the  ancient.

In his considerations on this theme in the Zibaldone we can appreciate Leopardi’s “relativism”, whereby truth has “two faces ... indeed an infinity, and “Consists essentially of doubt”:

 

It is more limited than one might think [160] – happiness consists of ignoring the truth [326-7] – on the subject of religion as a cohesive element for Italians: “where apologists for religion deduce of it that states are established and preserved by truth, and destroyed by error”, Leopardi asserts the diametrically opposite [331-2] – “It is not enough to understand a proposition as true, one needs to feel its truth” [347-9] – one cannot know one without knowing its relationship with the others [1090-1, 1239-40] – there is no absolute truth: “all truths have two faces, different or contrary,  indeed an infinity” [1632, 2527-8] – “it consists essentially of doubt” [1655] – it has different aspects, that depend on mood [1690-1] – it depends on circumstance, also in a single individual [1766-7] – often the deepest truths present themselves as illusions; they are discovered by men of great imagination and only later are they sanctioned by reason [1855-6, 1975-6, 3244-5, 3269-71, 3553] – those absolute are very few, also in the system of nature [1961] – modern philosophy, unlike the ancient, shows the falsity of errors but does not replace them with any positive truth [2709-15, 4192-3] – “universal and great truths” observed by Leopardi [3878] – truth has vanished the moment we start looking for it [4207-9].