He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century[7][8] but routinely compared by Italian critics to his older contemporary Alessandro Manzoni despite expressing "diametrically opposite positions.

"[9] Although he lived in a secluded town in the conservative Papal States, he came into contact with the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and, through his own literary evolution, created a remarkable and renowned poetic work, related to the Romantic era.

His mother, Marchioness Adelaide Antici Mattei, was a cold and authoritarian woman, obsessed with rebuilding the family's financial fortunes, which had been destroyed by her husband's gambling addiction.

However, Giacomo's happy childhood, which he spent with his younger brother Carlo Orazio and his sister Paolina, left its mark on the poet, who recorded his experiences in the poem Le Ricordanze.

These "mad and most desperate" studies included an extraordinary knowledge of classical and philological culture – he could fluently read and write Latin, ancient Greek and Hebrew – but he lacked an open and stimulating formal education.

Although his idiosyncratic and pessimistic ideas made him a party of one, he railed against Italy's "state of subjection" and was "in sympathy with the ideals of constitutionalism, republicanism and democracy, and supportive of movements urging Italians to fight for their independence.

Thanks to Antonio Ranieri's intervention with the authorities, Leopardi's remains were not buried in a common grave (as the strict hygiene regulations of the time required), but in the atrium of the Church of San Vitale at Fuorigrotta.

In the same year he translated Batracomiomachia (the war between the frogs and mice in which Zeus eventually sends in the crabs to exterminate them all), an ironic rhapsody which pokes fun at Homer's Iliad, once attributed to the epic poet himself.

In the same year, in a letter to the compilers of the Biblioteca Italiana (Monti, Acerbi, Giordani), Leopardi argued against Madame de Staël's article inviting Italians to stop looking to the past, but instead study the works of foreigners, so as to reinvigorate their literature.

In the same period, he participated in the debate, which engulfed the literary Europe of the time, between the classicists and the romanticists, affirming his position in favour of the first in the Discorso di un Italiano attorno alla poesia romantica ("Discourse of an Italian concerning romantic poetry").

In the poem All'Italia, Leopardi laments the fallen at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC, fought between the Greeks under Leonidas and the Persians under Xerxes), and evokes the greatness of the past.

His eyes cannot reach the horizon, because of a hedge surrounding the site; his thought, instead, is able to imagine spaces without limits: "Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle, E questa siepe, che da tanta parte Dell'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude."

The canto begins as a sweet apostrophe to the placid nights, once dear to the serene poet, but the words turn rapidly to a violent evocation of nature in tempest which echoes her inner turmoil.

After having wished to the man she has loved in vain that little bit of happiness which is possible to attain on this earth, Sappho concludes by affirming that of all the hopes for joy, of all the illusions, there remains to await her only Tartarus.

However, the accusation Leopardi makes against Nature is very strong, as being responsible for the sweet dreams of youth and for the subsequent suffering, after "the appearance of truth" (l'apparir del vero, v.60) has shattered them.

In 1829, at Recanati, where he was constrained to return, against his wishes, because of increasing infirmity and financial difficulties, the poet wrote Le Ricordanze ("Memories"), perhaps the poem where autobiographical elements are the most evident.

Throughout the entire poem, in fact, the moon remains silent, and the dialogue is transformed therefore into a long and urgent existential monologue of the sheep-herder, in desperate search of explanations to provide a sense to the pointlessness of existence.

It is precisely the absence of response on the part of the celestial orb which provokes him to continue to investigate, ever more profoundly, into the role of the moon, and therefore into that of humanity, with respect to life and the world, defining ever more sharply the "arid truth" so dear to the poetry of Leopardi.

There appears, however, in the middle of this strophe, a very important distinction: the course of human life is finite and its passage, similar to that of a "vecchierel bianco" (Petrarch, Canzoniere, XVI), terminates tragically in the "horrid abyss" of death.

In the third strophe, the sheep-herder turns again to the moon with renewed vigour and hope, believing that the orb, precisely because of this privileged extra-worldly condition, can provide him with the answers to his most urgent questions: what is life?

The more desolate the solitude which surrounds him, the more tightly he grasps onto love as the faith in his idealized, illusory, eternal woman ("sua donna") who placates suffering, disillusion and bitterness.

Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna scolpito nel monumento sepolcrale della medesima ("On the portrait of a beautiful woman sculpted in her sepulchral monument") is basically an extension of the above.

Leopardi, after having described the nothingness of the world and of man with respect to the universe; after having lamented the precariousness of the human condition threatened by the capriciousness of nature, not as exceptional evils but as continuous and constant; and after having satirized the arrogance and the credulity of man, who propounds ideas of progress and hopes, even while knowing he is mortal, to render himself eternal, concludes with the observation that reciprocal solidarity is the only defence against the common enemy which is nature (see Operette morali, "Dialogo di Plotino e Porfirio").

An essential change occurs with the Ginestra, which closes the poetic career of Leopardi along with Il tramonto della Luna, which takes up the old themes of the fall of youthful illusions.

The work, written in 1835, was intended to be satirical (he first believes that man is unhappy and miserable, but now progress has made him reconsider his position), but the thought of the inevitable destruction to which nature condemns everything leads him to express bitter conclusions in spite of himself.

The publication took place, posthumously, in Paris in 1842, provoking a universal reaction of outrage and condemnation, as much for the cutting and anti-heroic representation of the events of the Risorgimento as for the numerous materialistic philosophical digressions.

The style generally renounces the expressive concentration of the lyric texts and extends itself in a wide and relaxed discursive pace, with alterations between adventurous moments and ferociously caricatural and polemical points, of description and philosophical digressions.

In the Zibaldone, Leopardi compares the innocent and happy state of nature with the condition of modern man, corrupted by an excessively developed faculty of reason which, rejecting the necessary illusions of myth and religion in favour of a dark reality of annihilation and emptiness, can only generate unhappiness.

The Zibaldone contains the poetic and existential itinerary of Leopardi himself; it is a miscellanea of philosophical annotations, schemes, entire compositions, moral reflections, judgements, small idylls, erudite discussions and impressions.

Schopenhauer, in mentioning the great minds of all ages who opposed optimism and expressed their knowledge of the world's misery, wrote: But no one has treated this subject so thoroughly and exhaustively as Leopardi in our own day.