Editing Giacomo Leopardi (section)

====''Alla sua donna''====
In 1823, he wrote the canto ''Alla sua donna'' ("To his woman"), in which he expresses his ardent aspiration for a feminine ideal which, with love, might render life beautiful and desirable. During his youth, he had dreamt in vain of encountering a woman who embodied such a feminine ideal: a platonic idea, perfect, untouchable, pure, incorporeal, evanescent, and illusory.

It is a hymn not to one of Leopardi's many "loves", but to the discovery that he had unexpectedly made—at that summit of his life from which he would later decline—that what he had been seeking in the lady he loved was "something" beyond her, that was made visible in her, that communicated itself through her, but was beyond her. This beautiful hymn to Woman ends with this passionate invocation:

{|
 |-
|
:"''Se dell'eterne idee''
:''L'una sei tu, cui di sensibil forma''
:''Sdegni l'eterno senno esser vestita,''
:''E fra caduche spoglie''
:''Provar gli affanni di funerea vita;''
:''O s'altra terra ne' supremi giri''
:''Fra' mondi innumerabili t'accoglie,''
:''E più vaga del Sol prossima stella''
:''T'irraggia, e più benigno etere spiri;''
:''Di qua dove son gli anni infausti e brevi,''
:''Questo d'ignoto amante inno ricevi.''"<ref>{{cite book|url=http://digilander.libero.it/il_leopardi/leopardi_alla_sua_donna.html |title=Giacomo Leopardi – opera omnia – alla sua donna – letteratura italiana |publisher=Digilander.libero.it |access-date=1 August 2012}}</ref>
||
:"If you are one of those
:eternal Ideas, that the eternal mind
:scorns to clothe in solid form,
:to endure the pain of our deathly life
:among fallen bodies,
:or if you are received in another earth,
:in the highest circles, among
:the innumerable worlds, and a star
:closer and brighter than the sun
:illuminates you, who breathe a purer air:
:accept your unknown lover, in this hymn
:from this world of unhappy and brief days."<ref>[http://digilander.libero.it/il_leopardi/translate_english/leopardi_to_his_lady.html English translation] by A. S. Kline.</ref>
|}

[[File:Leopardi Opere Napoli 1835.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|Cover of the ''[[Small Moral Works|Operette morali]]'' in the last edition of Leopardi's ''Works'' in his lifetime, Naples 1835]]