Small Moral Works

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Small Moral Works" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Italian. (July 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 705 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Italian Wikipedia article at [[:it:Operette morali]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|it|Operette morali}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Small Moral Works

The title page of the expanded 1835 publication
Author	Giacomo Leopardi
Original title	Operette morali
Language	Italian
Genre	Philosophy
Published	1827 (1st edition)
Publication place	Italy

Small Moral Works (Italian: Operette morali [opeˌrette moˈraːli]) is a collection of 24 writings (dialogues and fictional essays) by the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, written between 1824 and 1832.

The book was first published in 1827, then in 1834, with changes, and in its last form in Naples (1835), in a censored edition; Antonio Ranieri, a longtime friend of Leopardi's, had it published in the original text in 1845.^[1]

Small Moral Works expresses most of the ideas collected in the Zibaldone di pensieri.

The themes discussed in these Works are: the relationship between man and history, between man and other men, and, most importantly, between man and Nature, of which Leopardi develops a personal philosophical view; a comparison of past values and the present, static, degenerate situation; the power of illusions, glory and boredom.

Unlike Leopardi's Canti, Small Moral Works was written almost entirely in 1824. Different editions show the addition of later dialogues and other adjustments.