Laudator Temporis Acti

Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (Chappaqua: Helen Marx Books, 1999), pp. xiv-xv:

It is sometimes a good plan, however, to go back to one’s starting-point; and while I was re-reading Leopardi’s works, I thought I would also visit his birthplace again. I arrived there on a grey November evening. In the little square before Palazzo Leopardi a piercing wind was raising little eddies of dust and dead leaves, and an old woman—the only human figure in sight—was hobbling up the church steps, with a little straw chair under her arm, her black shawl drawn tightly around her. I followed. In the centre of the nave, beyond the font where Leopardi was baptized, a bier, draped in black velvet, with a great waxen candle at each corner, was prepared for a funeral. The long wooden bench where I knelt still bore the inscription, gentis Leopardae. I came out and wandered up the long, winding street. The shutters of the palazzi were closed; an unusually high proportion of the people I met seemed to be either crippled or infirm; and another blast of biting wind came with renewed vigour up one of the narrow side streets, at the corner where Leopardi’s hat was blown off, and the little boys jeered, as he wrapped his cape over his head.

I rang the bell of Palazzo Leopardi and was shown into the library; its chill—though it was only November—entered my bones. On the table, in a case, I saw the brown rugs which the poet used to wrap round his shoulders and knees: they seemed thin. Beside his inkstand the petals of the carnation left there by Carducci had shrunk to a pinch of dust. But everything else in the library was unchanged. Still a metal grating enclosed the books forbidden by the Church and among them Leopardi’s own Operette Morali; still the traveller may see the beautiful copperplate hand in which, at ten years old, the poet wrote out his dissertations and his translations of Horace; still he may handle Leopardi’s Virgil, his Tasso, and his great lexicons; and still, across the little square, he may see the window where Leopardi watched Silvia at her loom.

Id. pp. xv-xvi:

And suddenly it seemed very easy to understand the mixture of love and aversion that Leopardi had felt for his native city. Bitterly as he railed against it, he never ceased to belong there and to feel the tie that tugged him back. He belonged to Recanati as Flaubert did to Rouen, as Joyce to Dublin. This was the town that in his youth he called ‘horrible, detestable, execrated’, a prison, a den, a cave, an inferno, a ‘sepulchre in which the dead are happier than the living’, and ‘the deadest and most ignorant city of the Marches, which is the most ignorant and uncultivated province of Italy’; this the city of whose 7,000 inhabitants he said that they were ‘only remarkable for their endurance in remaining there’, while he himself vowed ‘never to return there permanently until I am dead’. And yet, and yet—hardly had he got to Rome than he wrote to his brother that life in a big city was only bearable if a man could ‘build himself a little city within the great one’. Hardly had he got to Bologna than he was walking upon the hills, ‘seeking for nothing but memories of Recanati’. When he returned there from Rome, it had become ‘la mia povera patria’; when he published his Canti in Florence, he put the name of his birthplace upon the title-page; and when, in the following year, he felt his strength decreasing, he wrote to a friend that if he got any worse he would return to Recanati, ‘since I wish to die at home’. And certainly many of his greatest poems were either written there or directly inspired by his memories of youth and of home, of the night wind stirring in his father’s garden, and the stars shining above his native hills.