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Literary critics and laymen all agree that Leopardi's greatest poem is L'infinito (The Infinite) which was written in 1819, when the poet was twenty-one years old. It without doubt represents one of the peaks of poetic creation in Italian, or indeed in any language.
Unreserved admiration for L'infinite has not prevented commentators from making some topographical observations. The “ermo collé” (“lonely hill”) is not a poetic invention: it is a hill situated near the Palazzo Leopardi at Recanati. The “siepe” (“hedge”) and the “piante” (“branches”) mentioned in the fifteen celebrated lines are not inventions either. (According to recent reports, the hill and its surroundings are in danger of collapsing. Let us hope that they can be “saved” in time).
But anyone with even the most elementary grasp of psychoanalysis knows that the fact that a work of poetry or art refers to something real does not mean it cannot be interpreted. A certain event in Leonardo da Vinci's life actually took place in his childhood, but every analyst knows how Freud interpreted it.