Nell’isola di Filottete. Leopardi e il topos romantico della prigionia

The theme of imprisonment is deeply rooted in the Romantic tradition and has a peculiar declination in Leopardi. Starting from a note of the Zibaldone on the confinement of Philoctetes on the island of Lemnos (Zib. 4282), this contribution aims to show how Leopardi, inclined to represent himself as a prisoner and/or anchorite, and while investigating on the anthropological status of modernity, makes use of some topical polarities (such as immobility/ action, darkness/light, interior/exterior) that are significantly recurrent in contemporary Italian and European literature from Manzoni to Byron, from Stendhal to Hugo. Nourished as much by a fruitful re-elaboration of Platonic-Christian coordinates (think of prison-life in the Dialogo di Plotino e Porfirio), as by the vigilant observation of current times – see, for example, the annotation on penitentiaries in the United States in Zib. 4045 –, the motif of imprisonment revolves prevalently around two distinct but related nuclei. On the one hand, the ‘fall’ of the human race and the annihilating effects of civilisation; on the other, the possible comfort that, paradoxically, isolation and restriction can offer to a corrupted and altered modern human being