The hedge is still there, and it is the whole point: the one that «shuts out so much of the final horizon». Giacomo Leopardi was barely past twenty when, on this hill a few steps from his front door, he set down the fifteen unrhymed hendecasyllables of L'infinito, between 1818 and 1819. The poem first appeared in December 1825 in the Milanese journal Nuovo Ricoglitore and the following year in Versi, alongside the other idylls. The hill is properly called Monte Tabor, after the Galilean hill of the Transfiguration, and the autograph manuscript is now in the National Library of Naples.
What to see
The place is a sloping lawn above Recanati, with olive trees, a gravel walk and the wall carrying the plaque with the opening line: «Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle», this lonely hill was always dear to me. On clear days the Sibillini mountains stand out along the skyline, snow-covered for much of the winter, with the Marche countryside running down towards the sea. It is the same horizon the poet climbed up to watch at night, for the gracious moon of his other idyll, Alla luna.
The garden is the old kitchen garden of the nuns of the monastery of Santo Stefano. Since 2017 it has been run by the FAI together with the town of Recanati, the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani and the Centro Mondiale della Poesia, and restored to a design by the landscape architect Paolo Pejrone. On 26 September 2019 the multimedia route opened in the rooms alongside: five acts, voiced by Lella Costa and Massimo Popolizio, and a booth where you can record your own reading of the poem. Next to it stand Palazzo Leopardi, the family house with his father's library, and the seat of the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani, founded in 1937 and housed since 1940 in the building by Guglielmo De Angelis d'Ossat.
Visiting
You walk up from the centre of Recanati: from the square of the Sabato del Villaggio take via Monte Tabor and you are at the gate in five minutes. The garden is a FAI property, with a ticket that can be bought online and free entry for FAI members; between the garden, the multimedia rooms and a pause at the wall, forty-five minutes is enough, an hour if you sit through all five acts. The Monte Tabor park around it stays public and open. Allow for Leopardi's house as well, which has its own entrance and ticket, and keep the hill for last.
Our editors' tip
Do not come for the view: the meaning of the place is that the view is cut off, and the poem grows out of exactly that, out of what the hedge withholds. Our advice is to arrive in the last hour of daylight, when the groups have gone, put your back to the wall with the plaque and read the fifteen lines half aloud, facing the hedge. It takes a minute and it changes the day.
