Synopsis
Giacomo Leopardi is a child prodigy who grows up under the stern gaze of his father, in a house that is a library. His mind roams but the house is a prison: he reads everything, but the world is outside. In Europe things are changing, revolutions are breaking out, and Giacomo desperately tries to make contacts with the outside. At the age of twenty-four, when he finally leaves Recanati, Italian high society opens its doors to him but our rebel won’t fit in. In Florence he becomes involved in a love triangle with Antonio Ranieri, the Neapolitan friend with whom he shares his bohemian living quarters, and the beautiful Fanny. Finally he moves to Naples with Ranieri, where he lives surrounded by the wretched and vital spectacle of the plebeian city. Cholera breaks out: Giacomo and Ranieri set out on the last stage of their long journey, toward a villa in the countryside in the shadow of Vesuvius.
A story of genius, suffering, poetry, loves and adventures.

Il giovane favoloso by Mario Martone – Italy, 103′
language: Italian – s/t English
Elio Germano, Michele Riondino, Massimo Popolizio, Anna Mouglalis, Valerio Binasco, Isabella Ragonese

Director’s Statement
The screenplay draws on Leopardi’s writings and on the whole of his correspondence. The interest is not in the anecdote: Leopardi’s life is one and the same as his writing, there is not a single line of his that is not autobiographical. Making a film about Leopardi’s life means revealing a freethinking and ironic man, contemptuous of social conventions, a rebel and for this reason often ostracized by nineteenth-century society, a poet who needs to be freed once and for all from the rhetorical vision that presents him as distressed and sad because of his illness. Il giovane favoloso is intended to be the story of a soul, which I have tried to tell, in all freedom, using the means of cinema.

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