Giacomo Leopardi was born in Recanati, a hilltop town in the Marches, on June 29, 1798, and died (of cholera) in Naples on June 14, 1837. In addition to poems considered among the greatest produced in nineteenth-century Europe, he wrote literary, philosophical, and philological essays, edited the classics, and composed a series of imaginary dialogues, the Operette morali. In 1817 he began keeping daybooks he called the Zibaldone di pensieri, which in my Sansoni edition fill twelve hundred double-columned, small print pages.
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