A biopic that portrays Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, the country's greatest since Dante, is considered as a good opportunity to present the poet to the world and enhance cultural understanding.

Il Giovane Favoloso, directed by Mario Martone, will compete for the Golden Lion award at the ongoing Venice Film Festival.

"The film is a very good opportunity to present such an important Italian poet to the world," Riccardo Minnucci, a journalist of radio program Ciak Rum told Xinhua.

"I am from Marche region, where the poet was born, and I can say that the film has made a very accurate reconstruction of his life," he said.

Leopardi was born in 1798 into a noble family in Macerata, a town in central Italy. His father was fond of literature and Leopardi grew up under his stern gaze in a house that looked like a library.

The poet's "mad and most desperate" study undermined an already fragile physical constitution, which along with his father's antiquated ideas denied him youth's simplest pleasures.

At the age of 24, Leopardi finally left Recanati, and Italian high society opened its doors to him but the poet did not fit in. He died in Naples during the 1837 cholera epidemic.

Simona Ripari, a cinema student from Macerata, noted after watching the premiere in Venice that some parts of Leopardi's house, today a museum, that are not usually shown to the public as his family members still live there, were partly open to shoot the film.

"So everybody now has the chance to know a little bit more about the life of this great poet. Enhancing cultural understanding is what film festivals are also made for," she said. Endi

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