Italian · 1798–1837
Leopardi ruined his body in his father's library at Recanati, a small town in the Papal States, teaching himself Greek, Hebrew and philology before he was sixteen and emerging bent, half-blind and permanently ill. He called it seven years of mad and desperate study. He escaped to Rome, Bologna, Florence and finally Naples, where he died at thirty-eight during a cholera epidemic. In between he wrote the forty-one poems of the Canti, a set of prose dialogues called the Operette morali in which Nature explains to an Icelander that she never had him in mind, and a private notebook of 4,500 pages, the Zibaldone, that was not published until sixty years after his death. His argument was that happiness is impossible, illusion is necessary, and human beings should be kind to each other because nothing else is coming.