"If I could but banish you from every kingdom in the world". Very few will have recognised the hand of Giacomo Leopardi in this verse dedicated to "soup". But it was the precisely the creator of The Infinite who also wrote some hard-hitting martelliano verse against soup in 1809, when he was just eleven. We can imagine the steaming soup tureen being placed before Monaldo, Giacomo's father, in the ancestral residence at Recanati. We know that young Giacomo hardly liked anything at all. He ate very frugally and was only fond of sweets. But in spite of his mother's desperate economies, the Leopardi household boasted elegant dinnerware in the finest eighteenth century Italian style.

The five pewter soup tureens in our range of dinnerware were inspired by this period.