LOVE LETTER TO GIACOMO LEOPARDI (SOLFERINO): THIS IS THE NEW BOOK BY ANTONIO MORESCO, A WRITER AND ESSAYIST CAPABLE OF SHEDDING A PARTICULAR LIGHT ON THINGS, OF GOING BEYOND THE ORDINARY AND WHAT YOU WOULD EXPECT.
Giacomo Leopardi, the poet, becomes, interpreted by the author through his writings, a portal to another dimension, where he can reflect on history and the present. For Moresco, it's a journey that spans his life experiences to provide a bird's eye view of what's happening around him today.
Why did you choose Leopardi, and how did he enter your life? There is always, for each of us, a writer, a poet, who steals our soul before and more than others. For me, it was Leopardi, whom I encountered as a boy during a difficult time in my life, when I had withdrawn into myself autisticly and had raised the drawbridge. Only he was able to reach me, with his voice, with his song, he made me understand that there was a place for me in the world too. Reading "The Infinite" in a school anthology worked wonders; it told me the most important thing: that beyond the hedge lies the infinite.
Is this why it is still so modern today? Leopardi told us the truth, criticizing the illusion of unlimited progress within a closed planetary container, mocking the anthropocentric arrogance of humans, of feeling superior and detached from the rest of nature of which they are a part. Today, these delusions of omnipotence—which he had seen and denounced from the beginning—are coming back to us like a boomerang, and we are paying the price as a species. Leopardi was ostracized and mocked for these uncomfortable positions, but it was he who told us the truth, not those who told humans only what they wanted to hear.
Why did you choose the shape of the letter? Because I'm not a scholar, I'm a writer, and so I needed a living, three-dimensional relationship with Leopardi. I didn't want to, and couldn't, put him on a morgue table and perform an autopsy on him. I wanted to convey the emotion, the feeling, which shows us aspects that reason alone cannot illuminate. This allows us, from a certain point on, to transform ourselves into two swallows and take flight over today's world, overwhelmed by delusions, wars, ghosts, and demons that were thought extinct but have instead returned among us.
What won her over about him? The explosive coexistence of poetry and thought. Today there are so many cages, so many straitjackets for writers. Leopardi—like other great, unruly writers—taught me freedom, the ability to transcend boundaries, the courage to resist misunderstanding and not give up. And also the ability to immediately see abstraction, to distinguish smoke from roast, chatter and badge from true passion.
