One of the best known poems in the Italian language is Leopardi’s ‘L’infinito’, in which he describes how a break of trees that partly obscures the view of an open landscape floods his mind with the sense of the infinite, and the stirring of the branches enhances the sense of stillness: Always dear to me has been this lonely hill, and this line of trees which, from so much of the furthest horizon, hides my view. Yet as I sit and gaze, in my thoughts I conjure up boundless spaces far beyond it, and superhuman silences, and deepest quiet – until my heart almost grows afraid. And as I hear the
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