The reason I have decided to place Leopardi alongside Borges and Deleuze is because they all share a theoretical interest in, and a concern with, the linear model of time based on the principles of succession and the infinite divisibility of temporal fragments. Moreover, in order to overcome the intellectual problems posed by linearity and divisibility they all use rhizomatic models. Of course it would not have been possible for Leopardi to propose alternative theories to linearity, as Borges did with the model of parallel universes and the theory of forks in time, which derive from post-Einsteinian physics, but I would nevertheless like to show that certain features proper to these theories are also present in Leopardi, not in theoretical terms, but in a performative sense, in the practice of writing and reading the Zibaldone