Leopardi, il poeta dell'infinito

If “Leopardi the Poet of Infinity” were any period drama, I would have liked it. But it is a series about Leopardi and it is no good.

The first episode is saved: Ranieri who fights for a worthy burial for the poet disliked by the intelligentsia and the church, Count Monaldo, superbly played by Alessio Boni (much improved over the years as an actor), whose moral and emotional tension is revealed by every tendon and facial muscle, the austere and terrible mother, happy that her son is sick so she can sacrifice him to her angry God. Beautiful, to put it briefly, the beginning.

The second episode is long, pompous and almost unwatchable, with the unlikely Cyrano de Bergerac-style correspondence between Ranieri and Aspasia/Targioni Tozzetti. Years go by and this sort of hunchback of Notre Dame remains too young, too handsome, too straight and with the same, anonymous thread of a voice throughout the entire drama.

I don’t think it’s right to have focused everything on Leopardi the philosopher, on his nihilism, defeatism and pessimism, when, in reality, this “fabulous young man” was in love with life, from which he felt excluded. Well yes, he would have given up all his wisdom, all his culture, fame and glory just to be like anyone else. Leopardi loved love and was easily infatuated, Leopardi shouted to the moon his pain and his anger at the wickedness with which stepmother nature had raged against him. In short, I didn’t like their having focused everything on the “Operette Morali” rather than on the great and small “Idilli”.

The figure of Ranieri, then, is completely wrong. From “Seven Years of Partnership with Giacomo Leopardi”, the figure of an exploiter emerges, certainly not of a great, sincere and disinterested friend, as they want us to believe here; who did not fight to have the greatness of Leopardi’s genius remembered, but rather the capricious pettiness of a poor sick person: neurasthenia, gluttony, small meannesses that were certainly present in such a suffering figure and of which, however, there is no trace in Rubini’s series.

In conclusion, Martone’s “Il giovane favoloso” is much better.