Word: leopardi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...worse for damp and mice. They included no fewer than 150,000 letters, more than 500 account books, 400 insurance policies, numerous ledgers-all of them adding up to a unique record of early Renaissance trade and a remarkable story of an early capitalist. British-born Marchesa Iris Origo (Leopardi: A Study in Solitude-TIME, Aug. 2, 1954) has done a brilliant job of sifting the Datini papers and presenting them for the first time as a biographical study. The theme that runs through her book is the unchanging nature of man, the unchanging sense of danger and disaster that...
Dumb Disciples. For the rest, there are serious critiques of Flaubert, Peacock, Leopardi, and personal reminiscences of James Joyce, Franz Kafka. Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde. This section is called Glimpses of Greatness, and Connolly aptly describes it as "a carillon of memories covering a recurring situation, the Maestro in all his simplicity and wisdom garrulously confronting his treacherous dumb disciple...
Freed from Trouble. As a future tragedian. Leopardi began life with every possible disadvantage in his favor. His mother, Contessa Adelaide, made piety seem more a crime than a virtue. When children-her own or other people's-were stillborn or died in infancy. Mother Leopardi "experienced a deep happiness . . . inasmuch as [they] had flown to heaven, while their parents had been freed from the trouble of bringing them up." Of Leopardi's father. Conte Monaldo, it is reported that he once took off his pants in the street and gave them to a beggar...
...Leopardi home was in the Adriatic town of Recanati, where today plaques mark the dwellings of men and women whose only fame is that they figure in Leopardi's poems. The young boy soon developed the habit of observing the life of the old town from upper windows (he scarcely ever left the house) and jotting down his observations in a notebook. At 10, he was turned loose in his father's library and spent the next seven years buried in books-"the happiest time that he had ever known...
...those years, Leopardi studied Latin, Greek, German, English, some Hebrew. When he emerged from the library at 17, he was a skilled philologist, a practiced poet, an authority on classical literature-and a ruined man. His eyes were so damaged that he could not bear the light of day; if he moved rapidly, "his head hammered and his pulses beat"; he was incapable of speaking to a stranger. Worst of all, a "double hump" had appeared between his shoulders-"a curvature of the spinal column...