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Cristina La Porta 359 HISTORY AND THE POETIC VOCATION IN 'SOPRA UN MONUMENTO DI DANTE' It is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice, that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all; yet the noble Italy is actually one: Italy produced its Dante; Italy can speak! (Thomas Carlyle)1 Leopardi's 1818 poem "Sopra un monumento di Dante" anticipates Thomas Carlyle's 1841 essay, promoting the idea of the hero as poet. The poem, occasioned by the 1818 publication of a manifesto announcing the erection of a monument to Dante in Florence, had an immediate effect on nationalistic Italians. According to Leopardi's friend Pietro Giordani, "Le vostre canzoni girano per questa città come fuoco elettrico: tutti le vogliono [...] Si esclama di voi, come di un miracolo."2 Leopardi uses the celebratory event honoring Italy's past as a pretext for criticizing his contemporaries and looking forward to Italy's future. The idea of turning back to the past is paramount in Leopardi's rhetorical strategy. The poem is an exhortation to virtue, based on memory. Traditionally, memory was defined as an art by which we recall past events, and by which we speculate on future events through their similarity to the past.3 Cultural memory is crucial to Leopardi's vision for Italy.4 Dante's reputation had not been generally high in the eighteenth century, as is demonstrated by Voltaire's dismissal of the Divine Comedy in his Essay on the Epic Poetry of the European Nations from Homer down to Milton (1727). The Italian critic Giuseppe Baretti begins his 1755 essay "In Defense of Dante" by attacking Voltaire, protesting "the insolent abuse the French writers lavish in general" on Cristina La Porta 360 Italian literature.5 Even in Italy, Dante's reputation had suffered under the international hegemony of French taste. The defense of Dante's genius reflects a growing Italian nationalism. For Leopardi, Dante represents virtues that epitomize not only the heroic national past, but also what is needed to ensure Italy's return to greatness in the future: literary excellence, political courage, and the championship of the Italian language. Dante is well chosen as exemplar, spiritual guardian, and victim of political injustice; however, he is not temperamentally compatible with Leopardi. A classicist, a liberal, and an agnostic, Leopardi had little interest in chivalric love, Christian spirituality, or the neo-gothic aesthetic.6 Leopardi's Dante is, in one sense, ahistorical; there is nothing specifically medieval about him. But Dante plays a crucial role in Leopardi's philosophy of history and cultural definition of nation. Acting as a poet/historian, Leopardi connects his tribute to Dante's greatness with a highly selective account of recent events in Italy. Attempting to represent the chaos of the immediate past, he sets it in the context of Italy's long cultural lineage. Leopardi's "Monumento di Dante" can be seen as descending from Vittorio Alfieri's Rime to the great Italian poets of the past — Dante, Petrarch, and Tasso.7 Alfieri describes, in his 1783 autobiographical Vita, his pilgrimage to the tomb of Dante in Ravenna, where he spent the entire day "fantasticando, pregando e piangendo."8 In his Rime LUI, "Ο gran padre Alighier, se dal ciel miri," addressing Dante as father, Alfieri claims that he himself is a not unworthy disciple: "O gran padre Alighier, se dal ciel miri / Me tuo discepol non indegno starmi, [...]" (1- 2). Imagining Dante's advice to a modern poet, Alfieri advocates political courage and righteous indignation. Speak out against cowardice, Dante says, and fight for your political ideals: "Se in me fidi, il tuo sguardo a che si abbassa? / Va, tuona, vinci: e, se fra' piè ti vedi / costor, senza mirar sovr'essi passa" (12-14).9 Byron's The Prophecy of Dante, occasioned by a visit to Dante's tomb in Ravenna in 1819, has a similar nationalistic agenda. He decries Italy's subjugation to foreign rule: "Are the Alps weaker than Thermopylae? / Their passes more alluring to the view / Of an invader?" (Canto II, 115-17). Byron speaks through the mask of Dante, who foretells the fortunes of Italy in the centuries after his death: "What is there wanting then to set thee free, / And show thy beauty in its fullest light? / To make the Alps impassible; and we, / Her sons, may do this with one deed - / Unite" (Canto Π, 142-5).10 The lack of a proper tomb for 'Sopra un monumento di Dante' 361 Dante, the failure to revere past heroes, was seen as symptomatic of Italy's loss of political will. During the eighteenth century, Italy had been reduced to near- colonial status by invading foreign powers. At first, many Italians, especially in the north, saw the Napoleonic invasion of 1796 as a promising step towards national unity and independence.11 However, they gradually realized that Napoleon was another tyrant as he increasingly exploited Italy's manpower. After the fall of Napoleon in 1814, Italy watched in disbelief as the Congress of Vienna once again divided it into colonial territories under Austrian rule.12 While Leopardi, in "Sopra un monumento di Dante," protests against foreign incursion, his nationalism is more literary than political. As a poet, Leopardi constructs national identity in terms of Italian cultural tradition, in fact, in terms of Italian cultural memory. Memory is preserved through reading, and past literature is the catalyst. His literary model in this enterprise is not Dante, but Petrarch. Considered a master of memory, Petrarch saw memory as crucial to poetry, history, and ethics. In 1341, Petrarch received the laurel crown of the poet in Rome. In the oration he delivered for this ceremony, he stated: "We are drawn by the places, I do not know how, where there remain vestiges of those we love or admire."13 At the same time, he says, he did not come only to contemplate the sepulchers of the ancients or to remember the city's "summorum virorum." The memory of the past is the prelude to a "non inglorium futurum." In his theoretical study of history, De viris illustribus, his Liber sine nomine and his correspondence with Cola di Rienzo, Petrarch voices his desire for the imminent return of Rome's past, an antidote to its degraded present. Leopardi, writing in another tumultuous era centuries later, when Italy's fate again seemed uncertain, places a similar emphasis on how memories of the past determine a country's future. He attempts to make sense of "the massive presence of history and [...] transform it into a belief," belief in nation.14 In combining the search for a national history with the quest for his own poetic voice, Leopardi could look back to Petrarch.15 Leopardi cites two poems by Petrarch as models: "Italia mia" and "Spirto gentil."16 It is easy to see why these fourteenth-century poems appealed to an Italian writer at a time of dawning nationalism. Petrarch's "Italia mia," probably written in 1344-5, was addressed to the warring petty lords of Italy, who were employing German mercenaries in their internecine battles. Petrarch describes Italy as Cristina La Porta 362 wounded, the green earth soaked with barbarian blood, and protests that the Alps should be a natural shield against the aggressive northerners: "che fan qui tante pellegrine spade? / perché 'l verde terreno / del barbarico sangue si depinga" (20-2). Petrarch's poem is pacifist: "Rettor del ciel, io cheggio / che la pietà che ti condusse in terra / ti volga al tuo diletto almo paese: / vedi, Segnor cortese, / di che lievi cagion' che crudel guerra; [...]" (7-11).17 Yet the motif of a blood-soaked land and the denunciation of foreign soldiers, along with the intense love of country, appealed to nineteenth-century Italians seeking political autonomy. Petrarch's "Spirto gentil" was addressed to Cola di Rienzo, the Roman tribune whose 1347 attempt to reinstate the Roman Republic Petrarch initially supported. Petrarch's rhetorical strategy is to contrast the moral exhaustion of contemporary Renaissance Italy with the glories and virtues of the ancient state. The image of present disgrace is juxtaposed against the achievements of the past, memorialized by the ancient walls and by the enduring fame of the ancient Romans: L'antiche mura ch'ancor teme et ama e trema'l mondo quando si remembra del tempo andato e'n dietro si rivolve, e i sassi dove fur chiuse le membra di ta' che non saranno senza fama se l'universo pria non si dissolve, [...] (29-34) Describing early fourteenth-century Rome, Petrarch sees a city already in decline. Years have passed since Rome was at her height, and the changes reflect a sad deterioriation in human character and national mores: Passato è già più che'l millesimo anno che'n lei mancar quell'anime leggiadre che locata l'avean là dov'ell'era. (77-9)18 For Leopardi, looking back from the nineteenth century, the decline seemed even more precipitous. The debasement of the present, the glory of the past, and the exhortation based on the gap between them is a theme common to Petrarch and Leopardi. Leopardi would also have responded, in Petrarch's "Italia mia," to the hope that antique valor 'Sopra un monumento di Dante' 363 could be revived by contemporary patriots: Italia mia, ben che'l parlar sia indarno a le piaghe mortali che nel bel corpo tuo sì spesse veggio, piacemi almen che' miei sospir sian quali spera'l Tevere e l'Arno, e'l Po, dove doglioso et grave or seggio.

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