Giacomo Leopardi, who was to become one of the greatest poets of his or any time, was born in 1798 on his parents’ estate near the small Italian town of Recanati in the dusty hills above the Adriatic Sea. It cannot be said that he had the happiest of childhoods and as it began so would his life continue. His father, Count Monaldo Leopardi, had squandered the family fortune through “generosity, pride and folly” and was deprived by papal decree from handling money. His mother, rigidly pious and exaggeratedly penny-pinching, took over the management of the estate and completely dominated the household. She rejoiced when her children died in infancy – they would go straight to bliss in heaven and would not be a burden on the family budget. But Giacomo survived.
Leopardi lived his entire childhood and youth in his father’s vast library. He had no companions and no interests except books. By ten he had mastered Latin, Greek, German and French. English and Hebrew soon followed. At twelve, presuming himself material for the church, he began to wear a monk’s dress. By his early teens he was producing philological commentaries, sonnets, epigrams, tragedies and philosophical dissertations and had completed a History of Astronomy and a Life of Plotinus. He never stopped thinking. Adolescent self-consciousness was developed to the extreme point that he grew breathless thinking of the intricacies of breathing.