Leopardi was thoroughly unhappy, and his strange aversion to the places where he lived revived with unreasonable violence. He wrote of Naples as a den of barbarous African savagery. He yearned for home and pined for his family, and the last letter he sent to his father (three weeks before his decease), was full of plans for returning to Recanati as soon as his infirmities and the Quarantine would allow. He had not been able to write his letters for some years, owing to failing sight, and was obliged to dictate them to an amanuensis. "If I escape from the Cholera," he says in this letter which was to be his last, "and as soon as my health allows, I will do my utmost to rejoin you, whatever time of year it may be; because I must hasten, persuaded as I am that the term prescribed by God to my days, cannot now be distant. My physical sufferings, incessant and incurable, have in course of time attained such a degree that they cannot get worse, and I hope that when at last the feeble resistance of my dying body is exhausted, they may conduct me to that eternal rest which I pray for daily, not from heroism, but from the intensity of the agonies I suffer." His earthly sorrows were indeed drawing to a close, and he died suddenly at Capo di Monte, when preparing to go out for a drive, at five o'clock in the afternoon on the fourteenth of June, 1837, aged thirty-nine years all but a fortnight. "His body," says Ranieri, "saved as by a miracle from the common and confused burial place enforced by the Cholera regulations, was interred in the suburban Church of San Vitale on the road of Pozzuoli, where a plain slab indicates his memory to the visitor." He was slight and short of stature, somewhat bent and very pale, with a large forehead and blue eyes, an aquiline nose and refined features, a soft voice and a most attractive smile. His father survived him ten years; his mother, twenty years; his sister Paolina, thirty-two years; and his brother Carlo, nearly forty-one years. His youngest brother, Pierfrancesco, who died in 1851, also at the age of thirty-eight, was alone destined to continue the family. Carlo was twice married, but had only one daughter, who died young, by his first wife. I am indebted to the kindness of the Count and Countess Leopardi for several interesting works relating to the poet.