ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The Giacomo Leopardis were one of several dozen aristocratic families in Recanati, whose population numbered 15,000 people. Leopardi wrote to the poet Vincenzo Monti, the scholar Angelo Mai, and the intellectual and writer Pietro Giordani, telling each of them that the publisher would be sending a copy of the Aeneid translation, and asking for their comments and advice. The early letters to Giordani give an extraordinarily vivid sense of a process of self-discovery, of a young writer finding himself and speaking for the first time in his own voice. Some of the major themes of his poetry and thinking are touched on or explored in the letters: the role of illusions in human life; the relationship between nature, reason, and truth; the predicament of the gifted and sensitive spirit trapped in an ugly body; the problem of virtue.
