The Letters of Giacomo Leopardi: 1817-1837

Giacomo Leopardi, Italy's great poet of the Romantic age, is the author of some of the most beautiful and best-loved poems in the Italian language and some of the most remarkable letters in European literature. The interest of the letters is both biographical and literary: they document the background — the difficult personal circumstances, the intense and troubled family relationships, the contacts and friendships with other writers — against which a haunting and compelling poetic voice came to maturity. The letters, not previously available in English except fragmentarily, are here offered in a new translation undertaken to celebrate the poet's birth in 1798.

Prue Shaw was educated at Sydney, Florence and Oxford, and has taught Italian Language and Literature at the universities of Cambridge and London. She is the editor and translator of Dante's Monarchia, in the series Cambridge Medieval Classics and Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. She is at present teaching at University College London.