Extraordinary discovery at the National Library of Naples .
A totally unpublished and "forgotten" manuscript by scholars of a very young Giacomo Leopardi , just 16 years old, was found in the Leopardi collection. A "notebook" made up of four half sheets, folded in the middle so as to obtain eight sides, bearing a long and dense alphabetical list of ancient and late ancient authors (about 160 lemmas), each of which followed by a series of numerical references (over 550 overall).
The writing was intercepted by Marcello Andria and Paola Zito who edited it for the types of Le Monnier University in the volume "Leopardi and Giuliano emperor. An unpublished note from the Neapolitan papers" .
"The unpublished confirms the importance of the Neapolitan Leopardi collection which is becoming more and more complete, providing scholars with an integral panorama of Giacomo Leopardi's work - reads a note - We are faced with a writing by Leopardi just sixteen years old , a regular visitor to his father's library, who made an accurate and detailed examination of the Opera omnia by Giuliano emperor , using the authoritative edition of Ezechiel Spanheim, which appeared in Leipzig in 1696 ".
"Leopardi, who only the year before began to study Greek as a self-taught, assiduously searches the best specimens of his father's library, the autograph shows us how although very young Leopardi is already an educated and curious scholar and already has an accurate working method , which will represent the constant feature of Leopardi's path - he explains - The years in which the young Leopardi approaches to reading Giuliano represent a significant step in the path of re-evaluation of the figure of the Apostate, for a long time overshadowed by the almost unanimous condemnation of historians until the middle of the sixteenth century and rediscovered in the eighteenth century mainly by the Enlightenment (Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire) but welcomed in Italy, between attestations of esteem and declared hostility. References to the work of the neoplatonic philosopher emperor Leopardi's work: in particular in the Operette morali (in the Memorable Sayings by Filipp or Ottonieri) and in the Zibaldone, in some philological exercises ".
