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! , 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 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. (1-6)19

The three rivers Tevere, Arno, and Po comprise a scheme of synecdoche for southern, central, and northern Italy. Rather than being a political structure, Petrarch's Italy is a cultural idea. "Italia mia" became for generations of Italians a vivid expression of national sentiment. Objections to French hegemony in the early 1800s were literary and linguistic as well as political. Leopardi asserts that the Italian language should always maintain, even as Italian writers investigate new linguistic forms, modes of expression that correspond to the language's antique essence, hence its purity. For Leopardi and many other Italians, it was important to rid their language of gallicisms.20 In the last paragraphs of his Discorso, Leopardi turns from a discussion of poetics to a direct appeal to Italian youth, encouraging them to believe that they are capable of regaining the grandeur inherent in their own language: "O giovani italiani [...] ancora siamo grandi [...] ancora arde quella fiamma che accese i nostri antenati, e parlino le carte dell'Alfieri [...]."21 The idea of national identity found through poetic language is made explicit by Vittorio Alfieri, a major influence on Leopardi. Advising the Italians in his Misogallo to resist France's expansionism, Alfieri tries to instill in his countrymen love for liberty and hatred for the French: "[...] che in te, ο Italia, l'odio contro i Francesi [...] che amare non si può [...] senza abbonire i Francesi [...]."22 Leopardi's older contemporary, Ugo Foscolo, briefly served in Napoleon's army, hoping that France would liberate Italy, but he soon became disillusioned with Napoleon. Exiling himself to London in 1814, Foscolo distinguished himself as a groundbreaking critic and promoter of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Foscolo's 1807 poem, "Dei Sepolcri," was occasioned by the 1804 Edict of St. Cloud, forbidding intramural burials, extended to the Italian Cisalpine State in 1806. Foscolo believed that sepulchers provided an important link between the Cristina La Porta 364 difficult present and the heroic past, necessary if there were to be any hope for a better future for , politics, and science. Foscolo set an important precedent, "politicizing Italy's momuments" as a means of defining national identity. Emphasizing an archaeologically rediscovered heroism, he telescoped Italian Renaissance and ancient Greek history.23 "Dei sepolcri" praises the walls of Florence, which shelter Santa Croce, where the memory of Galileo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Alfieri is preserved. Santa Croce also appears as a locus of past heroism in Canto IV, Stanza LIV, of Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (1818), where he honors the remains of Italy's past geniuses: "In Santa Croce's holy precincts lie / Ashes which make it holier, dust which is / Even in itself an immortality, [...]."24 Santa Croce was, for Foscolo, as it would be for Byron, the symbol not only of Florentine greatness, but also of Italian nationalism. In the early stanzas of "Dei Sepolcri," Foscolo uses the rhetorical question as a vehicle for a meditation on mortality and fame:

Non vive ei forse anche sotterra, quando gli sarà muta l'armonia del giorno, se può destarla con soavi cure nella mente de' suoi? [...] (26-29)25

Here, the syntax of a negative rhetorical question is further complicated by a conditional subordinate clause. This hope that the memory of great Italians will live on is couched in an aura of uncertainty. In "Sopra un monumento di Dante," Leopardi raises some of the same themes as Foscolo and uses a similarly melancholic and personal rhetoric. Leopardi begins by warning Italians against complacency in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna, which had achieved peace at the price of again carving Italy into colonial fiefdoms.26 Leopardi establishes a feeling of uncertainty syntactically, using a subordinating conjunction: "perché le nostri genti / pace sotto le bianche ali raccolga, [...]" (1-2). Lamenting the post-Renaissance lethargy of Italy, he complains that Italians no longer look back at their illustrious past: "dell'antico sopor l'itale menti / s'ai patrii esempi della prisca etade / questa terra fatal non si rivolga" (4-6). Leopardi breaks this anxious mood with an emotional apostrophe: "O Italia, a cor ti stia / far ai passati onor; [...]" (7-8).27 He appeals to his nation's heart, which is the 'Sopra un monumento di Dante' 365 site of feelings and "illusioni," or ideals. Leopardi's concept of illusions is complex. In an 1821 entry of the Zibaldone, he states that patriotism can only reveal itself and remain fruitful when accompanied by "illusioni."28 Associating "illusioni" with myth or fable, Leopardi follows Giambattista Vico in treating history as a myth, "a fable," a fable that attains a convincing level of truth which the poet grasps imaginatively. Referring to the great Italian poets, Petrarch and Dante, Vico remarks that, even though they wrote fiction, these authors depicted real persons. Vico sees Dante as following in the poetic lineage of Homer, whose Iliad chronicles the beginnings of Greek history. Considering Petrarch's Trionfi "a collection of histories," Vico proclaims Petrarch the next great historian. In his Scienza Nuova, Vico asserts that Homer establishes the paradigm of poetic history. "The first fables," says Vico, were indeed "the histories" of the ancient nations.29 Like the poet, the historian can only make sense of events by using paradigms, which govern both how events are perceived and how they will be represented. Exploring analogies between the disciplines of history and poetry, with emphasis on the Vichian tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, Hayden White states that history, as a form of representation, involves the consciousness of the historian, which is poetic "inasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical."30 In "Sopra un monumento di Dante," Leopardi, like Vico, sees Dante as the successor to Homer. He refers to the Greek bard periphrastically: "dove giaccia colui per lo cui verso / il meonio cantor non è più solo" (21-22). Leopardi's paradigm of Italy is emotional and familial: "oggi vedove son le tue contrade / né v'è chi d'onorar ti si convegna" (9-10). His reference to the widowed shores implicitly introduces the idea of Italy as a bereaved wife and mother. In Petrarch's "Spirto gentil," Italy is personified as an old, sad, and abandoned woman: "Italia, che suoi guai non par che senta, / vecchia oziosa et lenta; [...]" (11-12). In an admonition to his contemporaries, Petrarch calls upon them to act responsibly as "husband" or "father" and protect Italy:

Ahi nova gente oltra misura altera, irreverente a tanta et a tal madre! Tu marito, tu padre: ogni soccorso di tua man s'attende, [...] (80-83)31 Cristina La Porta 366

In "Sopra un monumento di Dante," Leopardi continues Petrarch's theme of the family romance. Italy is the mother/widow, his countrymen "coward" sons, and Dante the poet's literary father, the creator of the national language. The idea of turning back to the past is paramount in Leopardi's rhetorical strategy. He repeats the verb "non si rivolga" and then modulates from the negative form to two imperatives, which launch other imperatives designed to prick Italian consciences:

Volgiti indietro, e guarda, ο patria mia, quella schiera infinita d'immortali,

volgiti e ti vergogna e ti riscuoti e ti punga una volta pensier degli avi nostri e de' nepoti. (11-17)

In another ploy to shame his compatriots, Leopardi speaks of the honor paid to Dante by foreigners, lamenting that they will not find him buried in his native Florence but in Ravenna:

Ed, oh vergogna! udia che non che il cener freddo e l'ossa nude giaccian esuli ancora dopo il funereo di sott'altro suolo, [...] (23-26)

Byron, too, in The Prophecy of Dante, denounces Florence because, having exiled Dante in life, it is unworthy to house his ashes:

Florence! when this lone spirit shall return To kindred spirits, thou wilt feel my worth, And seek to honour with an empty urn To ashes thou shall ne'er obtain — Alas! (Canto IV, 137-40)32

Within Santa Croce there is no tomb for Dante, but only a cenotaph. Tombs serve an important function in memorializing the heroes of the past. Monuments are altars, uniting future generations and past heroes in communal rituals. Foscolo makes this point in "Dei 'Sopra un monumento di Dante' 367

Sepolcri" when he cuts abruptly from Alfieri's tomb to the Greek heroes at Marathon, whose valor against the Persians was sung by Simonides:

Con questi grandi abita eterno: e l'ossa fremono amor di patria. Ah sì! da quella religiosa pace un Nume parla: e nutria contro a' Persi in Maratona ove Atene sacrò tombe a' suoi prodi, [...] (196-200)33

For Italians, Greco-Roman antiquity is an indigenous rather than a foreign culture, and the classical heritage becomes part of the search for national identity. In the companion poem to "Sopra un monumento di Dante," "All'Italia," Leopardi also evokes the Greeks at Thermopylae, contrasting them with contemporary Italian soldiers ingloriously fighting for Napleon:

Oh misero colui che in guerra è spento, non per li patrii lidi e per la pia consorte e i figli cari, ma da nemici altrui [...] (54-57)

Significantly, Leopardi speaks through the mask of Simonides, eulogist of the Greek heroes and legendary founder of the art of memory:

Simonide salia, guardando l'etra e la marina e il suolo.

E di lacrime sparso ambe le guance, e il petto ansante, e vacillante il piede, toglieasi in man la lira: Beatissimi voi, ch'offriste il petto alle nemiche lance [...] (79-85)34

Petrarch, too, invoked the spirit of the Greeks at the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) in his Ό aspettata in ciel, beata e bella," an exhortation urging his countrymen to embark on a crusade. Petrarch also refers to the mountain pass of Thermopylae, defended by the Spartan troops Cristina La Porta 368 under Leonidas (the Lion) against the Persian Xerxes:

Et non pur questa misera ruina del popolo infelice d'oriente vittoria t'empromette, ma Maratona et le mortali strette che difese il Leon con poca gente, [...]. (97-101)35

In "All'Italia," Leopardi alludes to Petrarch's exemplar of ancient courage, simultaneously shaming his compatriots and inciting them to defend Italy:

ο tessaliche strette, dove la Persia e il fato assai men forte fu di poch'alme franche e generose! (65-67)36

Building on literary tradition, Leopardi once again emphasizes cultural continuity through intertextuality. At the end of the second stanza of "Sopra un monumento di Dante," Leopardi apostrophizes the writers and signers of the monument manifesto, praising their noble work as "washing away" Italy's present defilement: "Oh voi pietosi, onde si tristo e basso / obbrobrio laverà nostro paese!" (30-31). The verb "laverà," unexpected in this context, underscores the need to expunge the "obbrobrio," the disgrace of Italy. Returning to the familial theme, Leopardi, in the third stanza, addresses the manifesto supporters as sons of Italy. Italy is personified as a mater dolorosa, her veil wet with tears: "e duolo e sdegno de cotanto affanno / onde bagna costei le guance e il velo" (42-43). Leopardi next considers the sculptor, Stefano Ricci, in two rhetorical questions.37 In both, however, he uses the sculptor's artistry as a pretext to assert his own power as a poet. What language, "Ma voi di quale ornar parola ο canto," he asks, will incite patriotic fervor? Shifting from what to who, "chi pingerà l'attonito sembiante?" (56), Leopardi sets the stage for his own preeminent role as représenter of Italy's past greatness. While the sculptor will provide the plastic image of Dante, Leopardi's tool of representation is language. Alluding to a line from Petrarch's Rime XXXIII, "perché cantando il duol si disacerba," Leopardi emphasizes the cathartic function of the arts: "Voi, 'Sopra un monumento di Dante' 369 di ch'il nostro mal si disacerba, / sempre vivete, ο care arti divine" (64- 65). In the fifth stanza, turning to the sculptor, Leopardi voices his own desire to honor the great Dante with his skills in shaping language. Once again, Italy is characterized as a suffering mother: "Ecco voglioso anch'io / ad onorar nostra dolente madre" (69-70). In Italy's literary family, Dante is revered as the founding father of the language, periphrastically the father of "l'etrusco metro." This underscores Dante's cultivation of the indigenous language with its roots in ancient Etruscan. Leopardi augments the power of Ricci's monument with his language: "e mesco all'opra vostra il canto mio" (72). The monument is a heartening manifestation of a change in public attitude; however, it is a mere sign that can never equal Dante's achievement. Leopardi's Dante cares more about the fate of his country than personal tributes:

io so ben che per te gioia non senti, che saldi men che cera e men ch'arena, verso la fama che di te lasciasti, son bronzi e marmi; [...]. (78-80)

The reference to bronze and marble, sand and wax, introduces the technical vocabulary of sculpture. In the "lost wax" process, the artist's first model is lost in casting the final version. This becomes a metaphor for the ephemeral quality of the sculptor's work, in comparison with the immortality of Dante's language. Leopardi invokes Dante as a kindred spirit, a poet who understands political strife. Italy was troubled even in Dante's time, when civil discord precipitated his exile. Yet, Beatrice-like, a feminine allegory of Italy welcomed Dante when he rose to heaven after death. Italy, once a queen, is now brought low. Leopardi echoes Petrarch's personification of Italy in "Spirto gentil." Wondering if Dante could imagine the depths of her debasement, Leopardi protests that he will not speak of Italy's troubles during the intervening centuries since Dante's death: "Taccio gli altri nemici e l'altre doglie; / ma non la più recente e la più fera, [...]" (99-100). This rhetorical gambit reminds the reader of the history nominally excluded from the poem. In the following rhetorical set piece, Leopardi addresses Dante with bitter irony: the great poet is happy in being spared what Leopardi is currently experiencing, the terrible pillaging of Italy's arts and culture Cristina La Porta 370

by Napoleon. In a catalogue of horrors, each new affliction is introduced anaphorically by a negative. Dante cannot see Italian wives being seduced by the vile enemy: "che non vedesti in braccio / l'italia moglie a barbaro soldato [...]" (105-6). Dante cannot see Italy's treasures being carted off to France: "non degl'itali ingegni / tratte l'opre divine a miseranda / schiavitude oltre l'alpe [...]" (109-11). Leopardi's contemporaries had been made painfully aware of the importance of their artistic inheritance by the legalized looting that took place during the French occupation. Antiquities, including the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön, were installed in a new Napoleonic museum in Paris in 1801, not to be returned until the Treaty of Vienna in 1815. Leopardi continues with his catalogue: Dante cannot see Napoleon's betrayal of Italy's hope. Despite Napoleon's proclamation of liberty, his real intent was subjugation: "non udisti gli oltraggi e la nefanda / voce di libertà che ne scherma / tra il suon delle catene e de' flagelli" (114-16). This antiphrastic strategy dramatizes how Dante's suffering is perpetuated down through the centuries by his country's failures. Leopardi rounds off his complaint with a series of rhetorical questions: "che non soffrimmo?" "che lasciaron quei felli?" (117-18). In the next stanza (stanza seven), the questions turn more philosophical: "Perché venimmo a sì perversi tempi?" (120) "perché il nascer ne desti ο perché prima / non ne desti il morire, / acerbo fato?" (121-23). To illustrate the depths of Italy's defilement, Leopardi describes badly equipped Italian soldiers dying or wounded, staining the vast snowy Russian plains with their blood: "Cadeano a squadre a squadre / semivestiti, maceri e cruenti, / ed era letto agli egri corpi il gelo" (143- 45). He translates their pain into a highly rhetorical and literary speech, beginning with the ejaculation "O," and moving through negative qualifying phrases to a stark predicate emphasizing death:

diceano: oh non le nubi e non i venti, ma ne spegnesse il ferro, e per tuo bene, ο patria nostra. Ecco da te rimoti, quando più bella a noi l'età sorride, a tutto il mondo ignoti, moriam per quella gente che t'uccide. (148-53)

The alternative to this wretched death, freezing in Russia for Napoleon, comes after the coordinating conjunction "ma." The alternative noble 'Sopra un monumento di Dante' 371 death is by the sword, fighting for Italy. "Sopra un monumento di Dante" is, as the title suggests, epitaphic. Exiled by political vagaries during his life, his work underestimated in the centuries since his death, Dante finally receives recognition through the proposed monument, but who will erect a monument to the Italian soldiers who die and receive no proper burial? Leopardi himself, through the power of his language, performs funeral rites for his otherwise unmemorialized countrymen. His anger at Napoleonic exploitation erupts into an exclamation. Leopardi calls on Dante to take pity on Italy. The father of the Italian language, Dante is also the ideal son, who could raise the suffering mother out of her misery:

Oh di costei ch'ogni altra gloria vinse pietà nascesse in core a tal de' suoi ch'affaticata e lenta di sì buia vorago e sì profonda la ritraesse! [...] (176-80)

Casting Dante in the role of seer, Leopardi asks him the future fate of his country:

dimmi: d'Italia tua morto è l'amore? di': quella fiamma che t'accese, è spenta? di': né più mai rinverdirà quel mirto ch'allegiò per gran tempo il nostro male? nostre corone al suo fien tutte sparte? (181-85)

The repetitive imperatives underscore the poet's urgency. Using periphrasis, he speaks of "la fiamma," the flame of inspiration, "il mirto," the myrtle, symbolizing aesthetic consolation, and "le corone," the wreaths that crown immortal poets. Leopardi's principal concern here is for the future poetry of Italy, which is the greatest history of a nation. Finally, he asks a more direct question, phrased in a characteristic negative construction — Will there ever be another Italian poet who will approach Dante's greatness?: "né sorgerà mai tale / che ti rassembri in qualsivoglia parte?" (186-87). The poem ends with a statement of purpose: "Io mentre viva andrò sclamando intorno" (190). Turning to his compatriots, he addresses Cristina La Porta 372 them harshly: "guasto legnaggio." He reiterates his principal theme, looking back. The imperative underlines Leopardi's sense of urgency:

volgiti agli avi tuoi [...] mira queste ruine e le carte e le tele e i marmi e i templi; pensa qual terra premi; [...]. (191-94)

Looking back, Italians will see ruins, and maps, and paintings, and marbles, and temples. The repetition of the conjunction "e" amplifies ("amplificatio") and prolongs seemingly infinitely Italy's cultural history. Leopardi, as poet and instigator of Italian patriotism, grows impatient; he issues an ultimatum, followed by the harshest possible alternative: "[...] e se destarti / non può la luce di cotanti esempli, / che stai? levati e parti" (194-96). The last lines of the poem once again refer to the Italian family romance, in which Italy is both mother and teacher. With a conditional clause that signals his uneasiness, "se di codardi è stanza" (199), Leopardi indignantly banishes Italy's ungrateful children: "meglio l'è rimaner vedova e sola" (200). In "Sopra un monumento di Dante," Leopardi warns his countrymen that, if they refuse to look back at their past, Italy will have no future. How does Leopardi find a paradigm that will encompass both the greatness of Dante and the misery of recent Italian history? The common imperative is to raise a memorial, to rectify the failure to remember. Self-conscious echoes of literary history help Leopardi establish his place in the line of great writers stretching from the ancient Greeks to the Cinquecento. "Sopra un monumento di Dante" is a palimpsest, a superimposition of past literature and history over the present. The historical layering serves two functions: first, Leopardi hopes to inspire contemporary Italian youth with nationalistic ideals; second, he is constructing a poetic voice for himself.

CRISTINA LA PORTA New York, New York 'Sopra un monumento di Dante' 373

NOTES

1 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, ed. Carl Niemeyer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 114. 2 Letter, February 5, 1819, first cited in , Canti, eds. Niccolò Gallo and Cesare Gàrboli (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1966), xvii. The poems referred to by Pietro Giordani are "Sopra un monumento di Dante" and "All'Italia." The city he mentions is Rome. 3 Originally categorized as part of rhetoric by the ancient orators, memory was shifted to the study of ethics by scholastic philosophers and placed under the rubric of the cardinal virtue Prudence. Iconographically, Prudence is shown looking backwards, either Janus-faced or holding a mirror. "Memory is a glorious and admirable gift of nature by which we recall past things, we embrace present things, and we contemplate future things through their likeness to past things [,]" wrote the scholastic philosopher Boncompagno da Signa in his Rhetorica Novissima, 1235. First cited in Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 57-8. 4 See Anna Dolfi, La Doppia memoria (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1986), p. 6. She finds two kinds of memories in Leopardi: "memoria biografica intesa come fedeltà, persistenza e recupero del passato" and "memoria culturale [...] risultato di conoscenza, secondo la quale apprendere non è altro che ricordare e esistere non è che un lungo assuefarsi e adattarsi al mondo." 5 First cited in Italian Poets and English Critics, 1755-1854: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. and intro. Beatrice Corrigan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 32. 6 Contrast "A Dream, After Reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca" by Leopardi's contemporary John Keats, in which he glorifies the two lovers. John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 370. 7 See also Byron's "The Lament of Tasso," in which Byron speaks through the mask of the imprisoned Renaissance poet, claiming that his dungeon will be more honored by posterity than the palaces of the Dukes of Ferrara. See Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. J. D. Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 367-9. 8 For a detailed account of famous writers' pilgrimages to Ravenna and the controversy surrounding Dante's remains up to the nineteenth century, see Corrado Ricci, L'ultimo rifuggio di Dante (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1891), pp. 324, 332-3, 340-2, 358-9. 9 Vittorio Alfieri, Opere (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1933), p. 55. 10 Byron, op. cit., p. 374. Cristina La Porta 374

11 Many men of letters, such as the poet , and Pietro Giordani, who wrote Panegirico di Napoleone leglislatore, praising the Napoleonic Code, at first believed in Napoleon. 12 In an effort to placate the Italian intelligentsia, the Austrians supported a literary journal, Il Conciliatore (1818-1819). Contributors included Silvio Pellico, Ermes Visconti, Ennio Quirino Visconti, and Ludovico di Breme. Responding to an article by di Breme advocating Romanticism, Leopardi argues that the Romantics are too philosophical, as opposed to the ancients who were more spontaneous and sensual. For an in-depth discussion of Leopardi's role in the literary polemics of the period, see Novella Bellucci, Giacomo Leopardi e i contemporanei (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1996), pp. 72-5. 13 First cited in Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 111. 14 Franco Ferrucci, "Italian Renaissance: Myth vs. History," Modern Language Notes 98 (1983), 114. 15 Leopardi wrote a preface and notes for an 1826 edition of Petrarch's Rime, published by Stella in Milan. 16 Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, Vol. I, ed. Giuseppe Pacella (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), p. 40. 17 Petrarch's Lyric Poems, trans. Robert Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 257. 18 Ibid., pp. 127, 129. 19 Ibid., p. 257. 20 Zibaldone, op. cit., pp. 14-15. 21 Leopardi, Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica, ed. Walter Binni (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1969), p. 947. 22 Vittorio Alfieri, Prose e Rime (London, 1799), pp. 4, 22. 23 By challenging the elegiac tradition of poets such as Thomas Gray, "Foscolo contributed to the larger project of reclaiming the Italian landscape from the tyranny of the picturesque" (Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representations in Italian Romanticism [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987], p. 117). 24 Byron, op. cit., p. 234. 25 Ugo Foscolo, Opere, Vol. 51, Tomo I, ed. Franco Gavazzeni (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1974), pp. 296-7. 26 See Leopardi's fable Paralipomeni, a satire on The Congress of Vienna; see also Salvatore Cassara, La Politica di Leopardi nei Paralipomeni (Palermo: Giannone e Lamantia, 1886), pp. 46-53, 66-7, 78-9. 27 Leopardi, Canti, op. cit., p. 13. All subsequent citations of the poem will be from this edition. 28 "La distruzione delle illusione [...] ha distrutto l'amor di patria [...]. Quindi è nato [...] uno universale egoismo [...] l'egoismo è incompatibile colla società" (Zibaldone, p. 2258). 'Sopra un monumento di Dante' 375

29 Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 22. 30 Hayden White, Metahistory : The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 30-1. 31 Petrarch's Lyric Poems, op. cit., p. 129. 32 Byron, op. cit., p. 378. 33 Foscolo, op. cit., p. 318. 34 Leopardi, Canti, op. cit., p. 7. 35 Petrarch's Lyric Poems, op. cit., p. 81. 36 Leopardi, Canti, op. cit., p. 7. 37 Stefano Ricci (1765-1837) was a student of the Roman sculptor Innocente Spinazzi, one of the leading representatives of the classical style in Florence. Inspired by Canova's momument to Alfieri in Florence, Ricci's Dante monument is highly rhetorical, featuring a personified Italy gesturing to the seated figure of Dante, while Poesie, laurel wreath in hand, weeps over Dante's bier. See Gérard Hubert, La Sculpture dans l'Italie Napoléonienne (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1964) and Cristina Danti's essay, "Sepolcri," in Il complesso monumentale di Santa Croce (Florence: Nardini Editore, 1983).