Giacomo Leopardi, who was to become one of the greatest poets of his 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.
