La vita vista dai morti. Il dialogo tra Federico Ruysch e le sue mummie

In 1824 Giacomo Leopardi’s thought enters a new phase: pleasure was no longer connected with vitality and the feelings which it provoked, but with the necessity of reducing the insurgence of vitality itself up to a point where a state similar to death or akin to sleep was reached. Which means that the exhaustion of the vital spirit was similar to approaching the state of sleep and also that passing to death did not produce any pain but a slow progressive slumber. The separation between soul and body – assuming that those two entities existed – was actually unnoticeable the same way that their supposed initial conjunction hadn’t been noticed. This is the main topic of the operetta Dialogue between Federico Ruysch and his mummies.