Declinazioni dello spazio nell’opera di Giacomo Leopardi.

We are in space, and space is in us. The alternative to space is emptiness; that emptiness (coinciding with nothingness and with death) that Leopardi perceives as pressing and oppressive, and that man does everything to avoid even at the cost of boredom, pain and evil. The space in Leopardi’s works takes on various forms, and hosts various levels of reflection and analysis, linked to the most varied fields of investigation: philosophy, astronomy, geometry, art, linguistics, sociology. In this volume, which partly contains papers presented at an ADI conference in September 2019, an attempt is made to provide a reconnaissance, necessarily partial and limited, of these different meanings of Leopardian space. The latter is investigated — starting from different approaches and methods — as a real hermeneutic category which, declined by Leopardi in multiple rhetorical-linguistic forms and by means of notions, concepts, images, metaphors, similes and analogies often science-based, allows him to focus on the one hand on the (materialistic) nature of the things of the world and the universe; and on the other hand on the boundaries of imagination, vital fulcrum of both the poet and the philosopher, as well as a mental place necessary and alternative to the real one. The inner space, linked to the individual’s imaginative and linguistic dimension, is constantly put into relation with the outer space of nature and society, where man becomes part of a community and a cog in an extremely complex mechanism that Leopardi analyses with relentless lucidity and without moral reserve or prejudice.