The poet. The poet of "the infinite". The fabulous young man. Symbol of Italian romanticism. For the first time the public and anyone from the world who wants it will be able to visit, under a completely new guise, the walls that welcomed it. Casa Leopardi "where I lived as a child." The new extraordinary itinerary. Accessible from today, June 18th. To touch his memories and try to imagine the sense of infinity that moved him.
Leopardi House
It was supposed to be inaugurated last March but, due to Covid, the obligatory postponement has come. They open then today the doors of the historic mansion of Recanati. The one in which little Giacomo lived with his brothers. A careful restoration has allowed the reorganization of the noble floor and of the rooms. It will therefore be possible to visit the bedrooms that the father had obtained from the north-east wing of the building, known as breaches, from the river cobblestone pavement. An environment where the poet's gaze and mind wandered every day, where his melancholy and genius matured.
The new route is part of the larger project Where I lived as a child. In progress for years, it aims at the gradual reopening of all places of the poet, expanding access to new domestic spaces. The library, the triumphal hall, the garden, the sitting room where the three brothers used to meet and their private rooms. A unique journey. A rare opportunity.
Leopardi: the philosopher poet
Leopardi is usually associated with a sense of uneasiness, of vague sadness. They come from his childhood. They derive from the hours spent in that house that we now have the opportunity to visit with new eyes, where Giacomo shared the hours with Carlo and Paolina, his brothers. Where together they saw (heard, breathed) the mortification of the father, who is deprived of the management of the assets, and who, hands over the leadership of the family to his wife, Adelaide Antici. Matrona, although mother. Shy and iron, she manages that beautiful, disturbing and sad house with a bigoted and anaffective attitude. An unenviable childhood. The internal instability of the Leopardi house seems to find perfect echo in the political wind that was breathed in the street, outside its walls. These are years of turmoil, the Risorgimento Italian.
Romantic feelings are welded to national feelings. The desire for redemption and the inspiration for one's land exceed the same attachment to life. Leopardi's thought runs fast, forms and deforms. The body inside the walls, the mind outside. The first Leopardian philosophy comes to life, the Zibaldone, the epistolary diary shared with Pietro Giordani. From home, to infinity.
The early disappearance
A restless soul raised in a place of superhuman silences and very deep stillness. A quiet that marked his health, early on. Leaving the house in Recanati, Leopardi travels because he wants to understand, understand: Rome, Bologna, Florence. But the distance accentuates the evil that is consuming him.
Stay elsewhere and meet the excellence of the new Italian thought: Manzoni, eg. But the evil hatched in that house whose atmosphere for the first time today we too can breathe, prevails. Leopardi dies at 39, in Naples, away from those walls. The infinite, A Silvia, The village Saturday and the immense of his intimate poetics survive him. And they will outlive us. And to the children of our children's children. Casa Leopardi, where I lived as a child: at our disposal from today 18 June. An opportunity not to be missed.
