Publisher's Synopsis
Giacomo Leopardi is widely considered the greatest Italian poet since Dante. Writer, philosopher, essayist and philologist, he was one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century. An engaging, highly readable biographer, Origo brings us Leopardi the poet, but also Leopardi the 19th-century romantic par excellence - a precocious genius who had written tragedies, poetry and philosophical treatises by the age of 16 and who later suffered debilitating illness.
