Time.news – The Leopardian collection preserved at the National Library of Naples offers a new, unexpected surprise: a notebook by the young Leopardi, probably dated 1814, when the poet was 16 years old. The early manuscript, which went unnoticed and until now unpublished, was intercepted by Marcello Andria and Paola Zito who edited it for the types of Le Monnier University.
The volume “Leopardi and Giuliano emperor. An unpublished note from the Neapolitan papers” is presented in Naples at the National Library – Sala Rari – tomorrow, Tuesday 3 May, at 4 pm, with interventions by Maria Iannotti, Giulio Sodano, Francesco Piro, Rosa Giulio, Silvio Perrella, Lucia Annicelli.
It is a ‘notebook’ made up of four half sheets, folded in the middle so as to obtain eight sides, bearing a long and dense alphabetical list of ancient and late ancient authors (about 160 headwords), each of which followed by a series of numerical references (over 550 overall). We are faced with a writing by Leopardi just sixteen, a frequent visitor to the paternal library, who realizes an accurate and detailed examination of the Opera omnia of Giuliano emperorusing the authoritative edition of Ezechiel Spanheim, which appeared in Leipzig in 1696.
Giacomo, who only the year before began to study Greek as a self-taught man, assiduously searches the best specimens of his father’s library: the autograph shows us how although very young Leopardi is already an educated and curious scholar and already has an accurate method of work, which will represent the constant feature of Leopardi’s path.
The years in which the young Leopardi approaches the reading of Giuliano represent a significant stage in the path of re-evaluation of the figure of the Apostate, for a long time overshadowed by the almost unanimous condemnation of historians of the up to the middle of the sixteenth century and rediscovered in the eighteenth century by especially of the Enlighteners (Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire) but welcomed in Italy, amidst attestations of esteem and declared hostility.
References to the work of the Neoplatonic philosopher emperor will also recur later in Leopardi’s work: in particular in the Operette morali (in the Memorable Sayings by Filippo Ottonieri) and in the Zibaldone, in some philological exercises.
The volume explores the meaning of the binomial of Giacomo Leopardi and the Apostate, in an interdisciplinary perspective through the essays by Marcello Andria, Daniela Borrelli, Maria Luisa Chirico, Maria Carmen De Vita, Stefano Trova, Paola Zito who conduct their reflections on the plan historical-philosophical from the 4th century AD to the Enlightenment and beyond, as well as on the philological level by investigating the folds of a dense and significant lexical and conceptual fabric.