Leopardi worked between 1503 and 1505 on the chapel of Cardinal Zeno at St. Mark's, which was finished by 1515 by Antonio Lombardo and Tullio Lombardo.
In the poem All'Italia, Leopardi laments the fallen at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC, fought between the Greeks under Leonidas and the Persians under Xerxes), and evokes the greatness of the past.
The poem is a product of Leopardi's yearning to travel beyond his restrictive home town of Recanati and experience more of the world which he had studied.
Throughout his career Heyse worked as a translator, above all of Italian literature (Leopardi, Giusti).
He has translated numerous authors and poets into French, including Goethe, Hölderlin, Mann, Mandelstam, Góngora, Leopardi, Musil, Rilke, Homer and Ungaretti.
In 1816, he began his legendary epistolary exchange with Giacomo Leopardi to whom he eventually paid a visit in 1818, accompanying him, during his first travels outside of the small village of Recanati, to Macerata.