On 1 July 2026 a group of international scholars working on the thought and literary production of Giacomo Leopardi reunited in Berlin at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry to discuss Leopardi and ‘the measure of modernity’. The papers, delivered by Gennaro Ambrosino, Michael Auer, Andrea Capra, Frances Clemente, Paola Cori, Luca Costa, Alice Gibson, Paul Hamilton, Bernhard Huss, Barbara Kuhn, Enrica Leydi, Francesco Marchionni, Christoph Söding, and Paul Strohmaier, explored the extent to which Leopardi offered extraordinary insights into the changes of scale brought about by modernity in relation to the way humans measure, map, and makes sense of the world. The symposium, organised by Dr Alessandra Aloisi and Dr Francesco Giusti, with the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership and the Society for Italian Studies (SIS), and in cooperation with Leopardi and Post-Enlightenment Studies at Oxford and the Italienzentrum at Freie Universität Berlin, was a fundamental opportunity to engage with Leopardi from several methodologically and theoretically innovative perspectives, shedding new light on his work and bringing it into dialogues with current debates on spatial, temporal, and social scales.
