From the hills of Recanati, on a summer evening in 1819, a remarkable young man, Giacomo Leopardi, reflected on this mystery. How can an obstacle become an opening? How can what limits become infinite? How can a barrier open the gaze to transcendence? The poet suggests an answer, sitting in contemplation before a hedge. That hedge prevents him from seeing beyond, yet it is not a humiliating wall. It is a threshold: the exact point where the real opens to the possible. Where the eye stops, the imagination takes flight towards “endless spaces.”

Each of us has our own “hedges”: the dependencies that condition us, the fears that paralyse us, the wounds that define us, the failures that isolate us, the crises that limit us, the illnesses that slow us down, ageing that weakens us. But if Leopardi is right, these very obstacles can be transformed from walls into doors, from barriers into thresholds.

The fact that the limit can be crossed does not mean escaping from the present. “Always dear”, says the poet, are precisely “this solitary hill” and “this hedge”: these, in their singular concreteness, in their unrepeatable uniqueness. Yet, in that crossing, something else appears. The suspended world suddenly becomes intense. Skirting the abyss of infinity, the heart trembles, but when the wind is felt among the leaves of the trees, a deeper contemplation is born. That murmur of nature carries within it eternity itself. It is then that the miracle of the “sweet shipwreck” occurs: not the frightening loss of oneself, but the trusting surrender to something greater.

Leopardi’s “sweet shipwreck” is a powerful antidote to the culture of performance. In a society that measures everything in terms of efficiency and results, learning the art of shipwreck becomes a skill for spiritual survival. It is not about renouncing goals, but about discovering that failure can be a form of life that is deeper and freer from the inessential.

In a culture that promises everything immediately and demands efficiency at any cost, such a discourse is not easy at all. For this reason, today living without censoring the limit is an almost revolutionary act. Perhaps our problem is not that we have too many limits, but that we no longer know how to recognise those that are good for us. We have confused freedom with a completely open field, forgetting what art also teaches: the painter needs a canvas, the composer needs musical scales, the poet needs the rhythm of words, the dancer needs choreography. Leopardi’s discovery therefore carries profound implications on the existential level.

This restlessness can serve as our compass. Let us move towards a sweet shipwreck in immensity, in search of a harmonious — or at least non-dominant — relationship with all things.

The limit, our finitude, is not a condemnation but a vocation: only by accepting that we are limited can we open ourselves to the infinity that dwells within us and that is fully compatible with human flesh.

To access the full letter: Lettera-pastorale-2025-Sul-limite.pdf or Lettera Pastorale - Sul Limite