The Garden on the Hill of ‘The Infinite’ was inaugurated on Thursday 26 September, the first FAI property in the Marche region, situated in Recanati on a hilltop that since 1837 has been named after one of the greatest poems in Italian literature, ‘The Infinite’ by Giacomo Leopardi.

This year, restoration works on the vegetable garden of the ex-Convent of San Stefano have been completed. It has been a unique project of cultural development, the most unusual and captivating challenge that FAI has ever faced: a ‘guided tour’ inside a poem, by definition an intangible piece of art.

The works have been aimed at the restoration and repurposing of the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani, founded in 1937 to promote research on the work of Leopardi, now open to the public along with the hilltop vegetable garden. Looked after for centuries by nuns, today the garden continues to be a simple and peaceful location dotted with cypresses and fruit trees, now restored to its historical nature with vegetables, flowers and a few rows of grapevines.

The route proposed by FAI, thanks to the support of multimedia technology, offers the public the content and necessary tools required to appreciate the history of the place, but above all to get a sense of what it was like by following the very same route taken by Leopardi, thus getting closer to his way of thinking, feeling, and poetry – something that could not be achieved in any other place.