[1] A liberal since adolescence, and suspected of belonging to the Carbonari, Antonio Ranieri was forced to leave Naples in 1827 and settle in Florence (Grand Duchy of Tuscany), a city open to political refugees, the following year.

[1] In Bologna (Papal States), he was briefly a pupil of the famed hyperpolyglot Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, then moved to Paris, where he met Antoine Destutt de Tracy and Lafayette.

[1] Nevertheless, he dedicated himself to historiography (Storia del Regno di Napoli, 1835) and literature (Ginevra o l’orfana della Nunziata, 1839), being favored by the association with Leopardi and close to his thought.

[10] Together with his sister Paolina, Ranieri assisted the poet to the end and, as he himself reported in his memoirs and his letters to Monaldo Leopardi,[11] prevented the remains from being thrown into a mass grave (as well as the strict hygiene rules required due to the epidemic), having him buried first, and clandestinely, in the crypt, then in the atrium of the Church of S. Vitale in Fuorigrotta, a quarter of Naples.

[12] Nevertheless, Ranieri's story had immediately appeared full of contradictions and many doubts arose about what he had declared, also because his versions were many and different depending on the interlocutor, making one suspect that the poet's body was ended up in the mass graves of the Fontanelle Cemetery, or in the Cemetery of the 366 Fossae in Naples (such was the fate, in those days, of famous people like Niccolò Zingarelli), or even hidden in the Neapolitan house where the death had occurred, and that Ranieri had staged an empty coffin funeral, with the participation of his own brothers and a corrupt priest.

However, it is proved that Ranieri lied in other cases: for example, he long maintained that he did not know where the 4,000 pages of Leopardi's Zibaldone di pensieri were: they were finally found in his house.

[10] On 21 July 1900 the official reconnaissance of Leopardi's remains was carried out and in the coffin – too small to contain the skeleton of a man with double hump – only fragments of bones (including ribs, vertebrae bearing signs of deformity) were found, and a whole left femur, perhaps too long for a person of short stature as Leopardi was, and another broken femur), a heeled shoe and some rags, while there was no trace of the skull and the rest of the skeleton.