dying, because death is the only good gift nature has given to human beings. In "Love and Death", love was still considered a good thing because when you are in love you have stronger feelings, you feel alive in an always new way. Now he has become skeptical also about love, because if he can't have Fanny, nothing remains for him in life. He just wants to die, to make all the suffering end. Death is a gift as it is the end of all human pain, which is inevitable because it's in the essence of men, it's in the cruel project of nature. The last verse is "e l'infinita vanità del tutto" which means "and the infinite vanity of the whole" and it indicates the inanity of human life and human world. Sopra un bassorilievo antico sepolcrale In the canto Sopra un bassorilievo antico sepolcrale ("Over an Ancient Sepulchre Bas-relief"), a young woman has died and is represented in the act of saying goodbye to her loved ones. The poet weighs the pros and cons of death, remaining in doubt about whether the young woman's destiny is good or bad. Leopardi, even while being highly conscious of the indifference of nature, never ceased entirely to love it. In these verses, the poet poses challenging and pointed questions to nature, enumerating the ills and sufferings which, because of death, are inflicted on humanity. Under the influence of love, the poet had apparently found happiness at least in death (Il pensiero dominante, Amore e morte). Now, instead, even this last illusion has fallen and he sees nothing but unhappiness everywhere. Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna scolpito nel monumento sepolcrale della medesima ("On the portrait of a beautiful woman sculpted in her sepulchral monument") is basically an extension of the above. The poet, drawing his inspiration from a funerary sculpture, evokes the image of a beautiful woman and compares her breathtaking beauty to the heart-rendingly sad image that she has become; one that is no more than mud, dust and skeleton. As well as being centred on the transience of beauty and of human things, the poem points to the specular antinomy between human ideals and natural truth. Leopardi does not deny—if anything, he emphasizes—the beauty of the human species in general, and by the end of the poem extends his point to