Sommario

7 

Le Études de la nature (1784) di Bernardin de Saint-Pierre e la poetica leopardiana

Abstract: The essay highlights the consonances between Saint-Pierre’s Études

de la nature and Leopardi’s works, proposing that the mixture of sensibility 

and sensationalism which inspired the treatise strongly influenced
the poet’s attitude to nature. Leopardi’s idyll originated from that mood, which

tended to persist, in some respects, in spite of his gradual distancing from the finalism of the Études.

Keywords: Saint-Pierre, Leopardi, Nature, Sensibility, Sensationalism, Finalism.

Parole-chiave: Saint-Pierre, Leopardi, natura, sensibilità, sensismo, finalismo

Abstract: XVIII century’s georgic texts chosen by Leopardi in his poetic

Crestomazia represent Nature controlled by human knowledge.

In particular, some verses from Coltivazione del riso (1758) by

Giovan Battista Spolverini’s debate an ecologic topic and introduce a

subject which is satirized in Palinodia al marchese Gino Capponi but

it is also fundamental in La ginestra o il fiore del deserto,

that is the contemporary  goundless arrogance and pride of the human

being in front of Nature.

Keywords: Nature, Illuminism, Arcadia, ecology, georgic poem, human hybris.

Parole Chiave:  Natura, Illuminismo, Arcadia, ecologia, poema georgico, hybris

Abstract: The paper retraces the relation between d’Holbach and Leopardi in order to bring out the transformation that occurred to the modern notion of materialism from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. This time frame

sees a radical paradigm shift from the compact “system of nature”, neatly contained within the mechanics of Newtonian physics, to the emergence of life

as an exception, upsetting the notion of matter. D’Holbach’s System, which Leopardi knew from the Dominican Father Antonino Valsecchi, should suffice

to explain Leopardi’s Stratonism, with which he is familiar from childhood and to which he was to return from 1825 onwards with his, this time, unmediated

reading of d’Holbach’s Good Sense. In this light, what appears to be fictional in the Apocryphal Fragment of Strato of Lampsachus can be re-read as a

‘half-truth’, expressive of the striking contradiction of life vs matter. This clash is meant to undermine the anthropocentric narcissism developed against the background of the spectacular celestial apocalypses, which had already been anticipated by Bayle, Buffon, Robinet, Maupertius and others. But even beyond d’Holbach, the metaphorical death of the sun and the planets in Leopardi’s Apocryphal Fragment does not let nature, however shattered, still stay “always

on its feet”. Rather, it shows the most bewildering side of the fall of nature: it opens “the door to chaos”, in the wake of a prophetical hypothesis about Strato first formulated by Pierre Bayle. It adumbrates the nihilistic ruination of the foundations of metaphysics.

Keywords: Leopardi, d’Holbach, materialism, stratonism, nature, cosmic catastrophes, life-death antinomy, chaos.

Parole-chiave: Leopardi, d’Holbach, materialismo, stratonismo, natura, catastrofi cosmiche, antinomia vita-materia, caos.

Abstract: The essay analyzes the presence of the IV Bucolica by Virgilio and of the Misopogon by Giuliano within the Palinodia al marchese Gino Capponi 

(1835) as both relevant inner texts supporting Leopardi’s radical
criticism to his contemporaries on the themes of society and education. The Palinodia has its core in the description of the child who builds and destroys

little playhouses. This ancient picture has last through time, now representing a naturalistic parable which discloses the undeniable truth of the natural evil in

the simplicity of a child’s game.

Keywords: Education, Society, Child, Nature, Game, Truth. 

Parole-chiave: Educazione, società, fanciullo, natura, gioco, verità.

Abstract: The emphasis that scholarship has placed on the integral autobiographic character of Leopardi’s oeuvre draws his work near to the contemporary Romantic context, one defined by the conflicting relationship
between a hypertrophic poetic human subjectivity and a natural nonhuman

object that, deprived of its own autonomy, is reduced to a mere representational embodiment of human imagination. I intend to offer an alternative interpretation

of Leopardi’s production by underscoring the crucial role that John Locke plays

for Leopardi’s philosophical understanding and aesthetic representation of

nature. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, along with Francesco Soave’s translation of Locke’s treatise, in the first part I propose three reasons to justify the influence that Locke exerts over Leopardi’s materialistic speculations vis-à-vis the generally-agreed-upon role played by the French Idéologues. In the second part of the article, I show how under the implicit sway

of Locke, Leopardi’s poetic production turns into an aesthetic space where proto-ecological responsibility becomes possible. I use Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia as a representation of a subjectivity intent to enfranchising

nature and emancipating it from the hypertrophy that characterizes the canonically understood Romantic poetic subject. The result of such an effort is

a kind of poetry that I call “of inquiry” through which the subject gives back to nature its voice, one that is constituted by the very silent presentiality of the

matter that constitutes it. 

Keywords: Ecocriticism, John Locke, A-dialectical Materialism, Silence, Romanticism, Poetry of Inquiry

Parole-chiave:  Ecocritica, John  Locke, materialismo  a-dialettico, si-

lenzio, romanticismo, poesia interrogante

Abstract: Under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Giacomo Leopardi meditates through his prose, poems and theoretical reflections on the primal scene of the “state of nature”. I argue that this construction serves both as a philosophical tool and anthropological reference, and that it shapes Leopardi’s original naturalism and critique of European social thought.

Keywords: Giacomo Leopardi, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, state of nature,

savages, political anthropology, decolonial thought.

Parole-chiave:  Giacomo  Leopardi, Jean-Jacques  Rousseau, stato di natura, selvaggi, antropologia politica, pensiero decoloniale.