The Canti: With a Selection of His ProsePaperback, 1 July 2006

Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet after Petrarch and one of the great prose writers of the 19th century. Caught between devotion to the classical past and a sense of the impoverished present, Leopardi rejected both the Catholicism of his childhood and Enlightenment optimism. In his world, all that we love and value is illusory, and therefore to be loved the more. His existential resolve makes him the most compelling of Italian poets.