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.