Eraldo Affinati – L'Infinito (The infinite) by Giacomo Leopardi

The evening at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, organized by the Musica per Roma Foundation and the De Sanctis Foundation, is part of the fourth edition of Literature Lessons: there are nine meetings held by writers and intellectuals who tell the public about the texts their dearest ones by giving a personal interpretation.

This is a special opportunity to reread and rediscover the great classics of world literature and contemporary works, to reflect through them on great universal themes and make them useful tools for understanding the present, through the voice of contemporary artists. Some of the most famous works and authors of literature are on the programme, from Luciano Bianciardi to Svetlana Aleksievic, from Dante Alighieri and Giacomo Leopardi to Emily Brontë.

With Eraldo Affinati - writer and teacher - we can immerse ourselves in the beauty and charm of the verses of L’Infinito (The infinite) by Giacomo Leopardi, a literary masterpiece that represents a hymn to life, the universe and the infinite greatness that surrounds us.

The poet, in his work, in fact, manages to capture the essence of eternity, inviting us to a dialogue with the infinite, to contemplate the vastness of the sky and the immensity of the universe, inducing in the reader a reflection on the fleeting nature of human life and on the desire for knowledge inherent in each of us. 

The lyric, composed of 15 loose hendecasyllables, is one of the most famous of Giacomo Leopardi's Canti, which the poet wrote in the years of his early youth in Recanati, his hometown in the Marche region. The definitive drafts date back to the years 1818-1819. Published for the first time in 1825 in a Bolognese magazine, it was immediately included in the 1826 edition of Versi, as part of a series of six Idylls. On the small hill that opens onto the Macerata hills up to the Sibillini mountains, on an afternoon in 1819, a twenty-one years old Giacomo Leopardi, climbed along the Santo Stefano road next to his garden up to Mount Tabor. With Recanati behind him, the poet abandoned himself to the description of a vast landscape, expressing his deepest emotions, with the sensation that the apparent infinity of that natural expanse expanded even further.

Those verses of his would become one of the most beloved poems in Italian literature.

Photo credits: courtesy of the Auditorium Parco della Musica official site