The Casa Leopardi is the eighteenth-century palazzo where Giacomo Leopardi was born in 1798 and where he spent most of his short life. The Leopardi family still lives in part of the house; the rest is open as a museum. What everyone comes to see is the library — twenty thousand volumes shelved floor-to-ceiling in a series of high rooms, exactly as the poet's father, Count Monaldo, arranged them in the late eighteenth century. The wooden ladders, the rolling steps, the marble busts of philosophers, the writing desks: everything is original.
You can walk through the library and several adjoining rooms — the schoolroom where Giacomo and his siblings were taught by tutors, his father's study, the small bedroom where the poet slept and wrote. Knowledgeable guides are usually available and worth listening to; the family connection makes for a degree of detail and intimacy that most house museums lack. Allow at least an hour. The garden, with views over the Adriatic, is included in the ticket.