Abstract

In 1816 Giacomo Leopardi intervened in the controversy raised in the pages of « Biblioteca Italiana » by Mme de Staël. The French writer reproached Italians for their classical taste, far from the models of modern Europe, from Shakespeare to Goethe. Our poet sided with the classicists, but countering, in a Lettera, the defenses of Staël, entrenched in its own positions, he gave life to his own aesthetics. He showed himself sensitive – in addition to Greel-Latin models – to pre-romantic cult of free genius (taken fron an essay by Edward Young) and of the memory of the personal past as evoked by a lyric to Apollo by Ippolito Pindemonte (which exalts youthful myths after the footsteps of Giambattista Vico, identifying classicism and instinctive harmony with the World).