From Recanati Leopardi first went to Rome; but he carried Recanati
everywhere with him, and he was as solitary and as wretched in the
capital of the world as in the little village of the Apennines. He
despised the Romans, as they deserved, upon very short acquaintance,
and he declared that his dullest fellow-villager had a greater share
of good sense than the best of them. Their frivolity was incredible;
the men moved him to rage and pity; the women, high and low, to
loathing. In one of his letters to his brother Carlo, he says of Rome,
as he found it: "I have spoken to you only about the women, because
I am at a loss what to say to you about literature. Horrors upon
horrors! The most sacred names profaned, the most absurd follies
praised to the skies, the greatest spirits of the century trampled
under foot as inferior to the smallest literary man in Rome.
Philosophy despised; genius, imagination, feeling, names--I do not say
things, but even names--unknown and alien to these professional poets
and poetesses! Antiquarianism placed at the summit of human learning,
and considered invariably and universally as the only true study
of man!" This was Rome in 1822. "I do not exaggerate," he writes,
"because it is impossible, and I do not even say enough.
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