He left Recanati for the last time in 1830. The next two years were passed in Florence, Rome, and Pisa. Whilst in Rome, Leopardi received substantial proof of his fame in being elected an Academician of the Crusca. At length the doctors recommended him to try Naples, from the mild air and general salubrity of which place they anticipated much improvement in his condition. Thither he went in company with a young friend, Antonio Ranieri, whose acquaintance he had made in Florence. In the house of Ranieri he stayed from 1833 until his death in 1837, tended by him and his sister Paulina (his _second_ Paulina, as he used to call her) with a devotedness and affection as rare as it was noble. Posterity will couple together the names of Ranieri and Leopardi as naturally as we associate together those of Severn and Keats. All that could be done for the unfortunate poet, Ranieri did. His condition was a singular one. Before he left Florence for Naples, the doctor said of him that his frame did not possess sufficient vitality to generate a mortal illness; yet he was seldom, if ever, free from suffering. He died on the 14th June 1837, as he and his friend were on the point of setting out from Naples to a little villa that Ranieri possessed on one of the slopes of Vesuvius. On the night of the 15th he was buried, in the church of St. Vitale, near the reputed grave of Virgil. His tomb is marked by a stone erected at the expense of Ranieri, bearing the signs of the cross, and the owl of Minerva, together with an inscription from the pen of Giordani. The few following lines from his own verse would form a suitable epitaph for one whose life was spent in bodily and mental disquietude:-- "O weary heart, for ever shalt thou rest Henceforth. Perished is the great delusion That I thought would ne'er have left me. Perished! Nought now is left of all those dear deceits; Desire is dead, and not a hope remains. Rest then for ever. Thou hast throbbed enough; Nothing here is worth such palpitations. Our life is valueless, for it consists Of nought but ennui, bitterness, and pain. This world of clay deserveth not a sigh. Now calm thyself; conceive thy last despair, And wait for death, the only gift of Fate." (Poem "A Se Stesso.") These words might have been an echo of «‚kyamuni's utterance beneath the sacred fig-tree of BÙdhimanda, when, according to the legend, he was in process of transformation from man to Buddha: the resemblance is at any rate a remarkable one.