This book reconstructs and questions the figures that define Leopardi’s thought: the relationship between finiteness and the infinite, the lunar presence, the stellar element, the link between the breath of living beings and that of the earth, and between the individual and the cosmos.

They continue to roam among us, even more fearsome than ever, the ghosts of modernity, which Leopardi kept at bay with a poetical thought capable of listening to the “sentient, recollecting and fantasizing singularity.”

While urging us not to take our eyes off the tragic, Leopardi emphasizes the necessity of the ‘poetic’ in a world that, unlike the poetry of the ancients and the world of children, fails to recognize the life that is in things, in nature and in bodies.

An anthropologist of the concrete, a cantor of the living, both terrestrial and cosmological, comes to us here, taken by the hand of a great interpreter.