On Monday 17 January 2022 we read Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by], written in 1832, taking both the Italian text and the English translation from the bilingual book: Giacomo Leopardi, Operette Morali / Essays and Dialogues, translated, with introduction and notes by Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 478-483. We read Leopardi’s dialogue during a session that focused on “The new year and the future”, which included also Virginia Woolf’s diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915 and Dante’s Canto X, 22-81, 94-114.

This dialogue by Leopardi is an illustration of his philosophy: life is painful, and people can only be happy when they imagine that they will be: therefore, in the future, never in the present. The passer-by asks the peddler whether he would like to live over again; he would, but only if he did not know what awaits him.

“PEDDLER: Any kind [of life], just as God would send it to me, with no other conditions.

PASSER-BY: Any life at random, without knowing anything about it in advance, just as we don’t know anything about the new year?

PEDDLER: Precisely.

PASSER-BY: That’s what I would like too if I were to live all over again; and that’s what everyone would like”.

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

Happiness is only possible in the future, which means that it is, in fact, impossible; the only way we experience it is by imagining it:

“The life that’s beautiful is not the life we know, but the life we don’t know; not the past life, but the future.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian]

In the UK there is a Leopardi Centre at the University of Birmingham, to which we owe the first full English translation of Leopardi’s notebook. In it, you will also find the exposition of the philosophy that the Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by proposes in a narrative form.

Of this very dialogue, there is a beautiful 10-min film adaptation made by the Italian director Ermanno Olmi in 1954 in a neo-realist style: you can see it HERE

Buona visione!