«Misantropo di se stesso»?: Self-Love, Self-Exclusion, Self-Sacrifice and Compassion in Giacomo Leopardi

This article analyses Giacomo Leopardi’s portrait of the ‘young man excluded by life’ drawn in the Zibaldone page of 5 November 1823 in relation to (1) Leopardi’s correspondence; (2) the scapegoat complex; (3) the poetic potential of the theme of solitude and isolation. Leopardi’s correspondence and the Zibaldone page suggest that he derived from his upbringing a ‘scapegoat complex’, i.e. a psychological condition controlled by conflicting feelings and moods, such as difference, exclusion, undeserved punishment and heroism. A way out of these conflicts was offered to Leopardi by poetry which, as evidenced by Il passero solitario , soothed the experience described into the Zibaldone page through the mediation of compassion.