style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">During his lifetime the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) published a brilliant collection of dialogues known as the Operette morali, whose pessimistic worldview inspired Schopenhauer to call him his “spiritual brother”. Yet little in the Operette or the Canti – the verse on which Leopardi’s literary fame largely rests – suggests the rich philological and philosophical humus from which those two works sprouted like rare flowers. It was only with the publication of his massive notebooks in 1898-1900, six decades after his death, that some scholars began to realise that, in addition to being one of Italy’s greatest poets, Leopardi was also one of the most original and radical thinkers of the 19th century.