Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers, from Nietzsche to Beckett, as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or 'hodgepodge,' as Harold Bloom has called it, in which he put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. Published at the turn of the twentieth century, it has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture, and its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now. A team led by of Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino, of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, has spent years producing this lively, accurate version.This essential book will change our understanding of the origins of modern culture. It is an extraordinary, epochal publication. 'Although all things great and beautiful and alive have been extinguished from the world,our inclination toward them remains. Though we may be denied these things, nothing has or ever could stop us from wanting them. Young people have not lost that longing which drives them to seek a life for themselves and to scorn nothingness and monotony.'