page_title: Antonio Ranieri
section_title: Leopardi's death and burial controversies
hierarchical_section_title: Antonio Ranieri / Biography / Leopardi's death and burial controversies
caption_attribution_description: Ritratto di Antonio Ranieri
context_page_description: Antonio Ranieri was an Italian writer, patriot and politician, better known for his juvenile intimate friendship with Giacomo Leopardi, the most renowned 19th century Italian poet.
context_section_description: To defend himself from the cholera epidemic (see 1826–1837 cholera pandemic), in 1836 Ranieri moved with Leopardi to Torre del Greco (Naples), in a friend's country house.
  On 14 June 1837, when they returned to Naples, Leopardi died of heart dropsy, as Ranieri reported – even if there is a strong suspicion that the poet died of cholera, and that Ranieri lied in order to hide a less decorous death. Together with his sister Paolina, Ranieri assisted the poet to the end and, as he himself reported in his memoirs and his letters to Monaldo Leopardi, prevented the remains from being thrown into a mass grave (as well as the strict hygiene rules required due to the epidemic), having him buried first, and clandestinely, in the crypt, then in the atrium of the Church of S. Vitale in Fuorigrotta, a quarter of Naples. Nevertheless, Ranieri's story had immediately appeared full of contradictions and many doubts arose about what he had declared, also because his versions were many and different depending on the interlocutor, making one suspect that the poet's body was ended up in the mass graves of the Fontanelle Cemetery, or in the Cemetery of the 366 Fossae in Naples (such was the fate, in those days, of famous people like Niccolò Zingarelli), or even hidden in the Neapolitan house where the death had occurred, and that Ranieri had staged an empty coffin funeral, with the participation of his own brothers and a corrupt priest. Ranieri continued to state that the bones were in the atrium of the Church of S. Vitale and that the burial certificate was a forgery written by the priest in order to circumvent the law on burials in times of epidemic. However, it is proved that Ranieri lied in other cases: for example, he long maintained that he did not know where the 4,000 pages of Leopardi's Zibaldone di pensieri were: they were finally found in his house.
  On 21 July 1900 the official reconnaissance of Leopardi's remains was carried out and in the coffin – too small to contain the skeleton of a man with double hump – only fragments of bones (including ribs, vertebrae bearing signs of deformity) were found, and a whole left femur, perhaps too long for a person of short stature as Leopardi was, and another broken femur), a heeled shoe and some rags, while there was no trace of the skull and the rest of the skeleton.
caption: Ranieri in old age.
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