Leopardi e l'infinito

There was a hedge on the hill of the Infinite, an ordinary hedge any that interrupted the view of the horizon. Giacomo Leopardi it would look at often from the his favourite spot favourite, and every time time that limitation physical led him took elsewhere, beyond what that the eye could see.

In 1819 he was twenty-one years old and already bore on his himself the weight of an scoliosis severe that had had deformed the body, of a eyesight progressively compromised and of a provincial life that stifled every ambition.

And yet from those conditions of limitation was born a masterpiece absolute. L'Infinito is a of the compositions most brief in the Italian literature — fifteen lines barely — and yet contains an entire cosmology.

The mechanism of the poem is simple and as ingenious: the hedge prevents seeing seeing the horizon, but precisely that very obstruction frees the imagination, which can then project itself without limits into the space and in time.

The ending of the poem is among the most most discussed in the history of literary criticism literary: and the to shipwreck is to me sweet in this sea. The loss of oneself in the immensity is not is a tragedy but liberation.

Leopardi was not was the poet pessimistic that the popular view school has handed down. He was rather a thinker radical who had looked in the face the condition human without illusions and without consolations easy.

More than than two hundred years after, his his verses resonate still with a clarity unsettling, because they speak of something that does not change: the desire human to go go beyond the one's own limits.