ABSTRACT
The return to poetry in early autumn 1829 is therefore framed within a return home that Giacomo Leopardi perceives above all as a defeat — human, literary, and existential — and within a phase in which every other form of writing is extinguished. Between these chronological and intellectual confines, however, Leopardi's poetry blossoms again, although in a radically different form from that of the liriche projected in 1821. Pisa also differs from Recanati as far as its cityscape is concerned. Once in the city on 12 November 1827, Leopardi employs thrice, in three different letters, the same expressions. Both A Silvia and Le ricordanze originate thus from failure, within a fluid and unstable moment in which the Recanati of Leopardi's youth is at the same time the hated place of the letters to Karl Bunsen and Antonio Fortunato Stella, and the catalyst of memory that almost immediately turns into poetic speech.
