Antonio Prete’s skillful guidance takes us with a clear and elegant style through the reading of Leopardi’s Zibaldone, in a volume that has become a classic for Leopardi studies. In the poet’s pages, an assiduous dialogue takes shape between the thought of the Ancients and that of the Moderns, and some major themes that concern us closely emerge: the centrality of desire, the critique of civilization, distance from nature, recollection, and the relationship between finitude and infinity.