Leopardi is a child prodigy who grows up under the relentless gaze of his father, in a house that is a library. His mind travels far but his home is a prison. While he reads about everything, the universe remains outside.
In Europe, the world is changing, revolutions erupt, and Giacomo desperately searches for contact with the outside world. At the age of twenty-four, when he finally leaves Recanati, Italy's high society opens its doors to him, but our rebel does not fit in. In Florence, he becomes entangled in a love triangle between Antonio Ranieri, the Neapolitan friend with whom he shares a house in the bohemian fashion, and the beautiful Fanny. In the end, he moves to Naples with Ranieri, where he becomes immersed in the desperate and vital spectacle of the working-class city. A cholera epidemic breaks out: Giacomo and Ranieri complete the last leg of their long journey, to reach a villa immersed in the countryside at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
The screenplay draws on Leopardi’s writings and on the whole of his correspondence. The interest is not in the anecdote: Leopardi’s life is one and the same as his writing, there is not a single line of his that is not autobiographical. Making a film about Leopardi’s life means revealing a freethinking and ironic man, contemptuous of social conventions, a rebel and for this reason often ostracized by nineteenth-century society, a poet who needs to be freed once and for all from the rhetorical vision that presents him as distressed and sad because of his illness. Il giovane favoloso is intended to be the story of a soul, which I have tried to tell, in all freedom, using the means of cinema.