In Going the Distance: The Coherence of Tradition from Petrarch to Leopardi, I examine the reception and revitalization of the Renaissance and early modern legacy during the first decades of the nineteenth century (1800-1836), the years leading up to the Italian Risorgimento, a period marked by a desire for political, moral, and intellectual resurgence. I focus on the poetry and prose of Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), the writer Nietzsche regarded as the epitome of the modern poet-philosopher. I argue that Leopardi attempted to redefine what might be referred to as an “Italian” intellectual tradition by critically advancing the legacies of four influential predecessors: Francesco Petrarch (1304-74), Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), Torquato Tasso (1544-95), and Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), each of whom provided methods for retrieving the past. Leopardi recontextualized these thinkers’ ideas on humanistic knowledge, literary imitation, rhetoric, and poetry in order to incorporate their insights into contemporary literary, theoretical, political, and pedagogical discourse. At the same time, he engaged with various Enlightenment and Romantic debates on such themes as cultural and national identity, imagination and reason, nature and civilization, progress and social reform, and artistic experimentation. Going the Distance narrates a twofold story. I show how the intracultural confrontation between Leopardi and the established tradition of early modern Italian writers intersects with a transnational conversation between Leopardi and the European intellectual movements of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.