Pietro Giordani (January 1, 1774 – September 2, 1848) was an Italian writer, classical literary scholar, a Freemason of the Grand Orient of Italy[1] and a close friend of, and influence on, Giacomo Leopardi.

The following year he obtained the post of proto-secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna which, however, he had to abandon in 1815: with the beginning of the Restoration he became highly suspect for his liberal, republican ideals.

In February 1817, Giacomo Leopardi sent three copies of his own personal translation of the Virgilian Aeneid to Angelo Mai, Vincenzo Monti and Pietro Giordani, the leading exponents of Italian classicism.

Giordani encouraged and fostered the Recanatese's acquaintance in cultural circles, and the two had great esteem and affection for each other: the young poet called him "dear and good fatherly image" (from verse 83 of Canto XV of Dante's Inferno).

[2] Giordani traveled a great deal and settled, at various times, in Piacenza, Bologna and, finally, in Milan, where he became an editor, along with Vincenzo Monti, Giuseppe Acerbi and the geologist Scipione Breislak, of the classicist magazine La Biblioteca Italiana.

Intellectuals generally abandoned the prospect of revolution in favor of a more moderate, reformist program, and the center of progressive culture moved away from Milan to Florence, and from the magazine Il Conciliatiore to Antologia.

This was felt to be a powerful and provocative accusation of backwardness by literate Italians, who were portrayed as a bunch of erudites who, in the words of de Stael, went around "continually rummaging in the ancient ashes, in order to find perhaps some grain of gold."

It is another thing to come back from there and desire to live like a Japanese among Italians.....Italians should study their own classics, the Latin and Greek writers....." All of these ideas were later to exercise a profound influence over Leopardi, who, notwithstanding his romanticism in style and tone, was, at heart, a deeply committed classicist in holding (and in stating in many parts of the Zibaldone and elsewhere) that the arts, and indeed humanity itself, had systematically degenerated from a high-point in the Greco-Roman past to a point in the modern scientific world in which true beauty was no longer attainable because of the death of the primitive illusions associated with a natural, non-scientific and non-technological world.

For this reason, the idea of literature in Giordani, in spite of the common classicist roots, is very different from that of Monti: the literary enterprise must consist in the affirmation of virtue, the search for truth, and civil education.

There is, in Giordani, a contradiction between rhetorical education and the urgence of renewal, as there is in his conviction that the only way to achieve cultural progress in Italian society is through finding a stimulus in the lessons of the ancients.