Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet after Petrarch and one of the great prose writers of the 19th century. Caught between devotion to the classical past and a sense of the impoverished present, Leopardi rejected both the Catholicism of his childhood and Enlightenment optimism. In his world, all that we love and value is illusory, and therefore to be loved the more. His existential resolve makes him the most compelling of Italian poets. J.G. Nicholls provides a translation of the complete Canti , explanatory notes, and a selection of Leopardi’s prose, keyed to related poems. Further background is provided by Nicholls’s introduction and a brief biography woven from Leopardi’s own words.