Giacomo Leopardi was a sickly, largely housebound young man in provincial Recanati when he climbed this hill behind a hedge that blocked his view of the horizon, and in that blocked view found the subject of L'Infinito, arguably the single most memorized poem in the Italian language.
The hedge (real, replanted, and maintained more or less where tradition places the original) still frames the same limited view, hills and sky and little else, which is the entire point: the poem imagines what lies beyond what the eye can see. The adjoining Orto dell'Infinito, the walled garden Leopardi could reach directly from his house, requires a separate ticket from the FAI, which manages it.
