Recanti and Loreto

                Today we visited Recanti where the house of Leopardi is located. It was the house where he was born, but did not die as he died in Naples. Inside of his house, we mainly saw the libraries in which he studied. I thought it was really interesting to be able to see these. Not only was it fascinating that we were looking at books which Leopardi had studied for years, but the idea of having libraries so elaborate in your home was impressive. Back home, we have a “library” that consists of my mother’s romance novels, some historical books, books from my parent’s high school careers, some random animal books, and a good amount of Asterix and Oblix books. They are not bound very nicely, they do not look that impressive, and they certainly were not studied by me when I was a child (except for maybe the animal books). Just looking at these libraries was impressive; they were absolutely gorgeous to look at.

                The work that Leopardi was doing at such a young age was also impressive. He was translating the Bible between Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Latin, he had learned eight languages, he was writing poems by the age of ten; he was doing stuff that I cannot even imagine doing in my life. Not only was his work impressive, but his handwriting and other calligraphy that we saw was beautiful. We have really lost this art of calligraphy and script handwriting that was the normal writing centuries ago. I think the fact that when people write nowadays we often have terrible handwriting and is print is a sad story; a lot of kids do not even know how to write the alphabet in cursive anymore. So seeing this beautiful handwriting was very captivating for me.

                After we visited Leopardi’s home, we had some free time in Recanti. It was a very pretty town, built on top of the hill. At one point, before we had reached the town center and we were still exploring, we started walking downhill. When we started to reach the outskirts, I thought to myself, why are we walking downhill? When towns are built on hills the center is not at the bottom of the hill, it is at the top. So after that we started walking up hill and sure enough we found the center of town. It was a very pretty town that again was fairly quiet, but it was enjoyable to walk around.

                Next we visited Loreto where there was a gorgeous basilica, bell tower, and main piazza. It was a quick stop that consisted of gelato, walking through the basilica, and enjoying the sunshine and some street art.