This paper will focus on the geological aesthetics of Giacomo Leopardi’s last long poem of 1836-7 entitled La Ginestra, o il fiore del deserto {Broom, the flower of the desert}. Specifically, I will show that the poem’s appropriation of a properly geological gaze, of the newly-institutionalised geological directive of proximity to one’s objects of study, acts as a critical strategy that effectively deconstructs the fallacies at the heart of early nineteenth century English, French, and Italian political progressivism and spiritualism. La Ginestra’s main line of cultural resistance comes through in its anti-picturesque figuration of volcanic catastrophe, as against the rather easy aestheticisation of catastrophe (as though it were not an actual existential threat) common to much contemporary painting, scientific research, and travel literature in the century leading up to the poem’s composition. The poem responds antagonistically to this trend in natural philosophy through an appropriate adoption of an emphasis on the visual and, as is evident in its recounting of the tragedy of Pompeii, makes a more-or-less explicit reference to the role of painting in promoting a misreading of nature as both spectacle and record-keeper. In the course of my paper, I will refer to the implicit positivism of contemporary geological art: including select gouaches by Pietro Fabris from William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei and Constant Prévost’s sketches of the so-called ‘disappearing island’ Giulia-Ferdinandea from 1831, during its most famous six-week appearance. My paper’s consideration of the literature and painting of travel in Italy in relation to Giacomo Leopardi’s poetry represents an entirely new line of research into the work of this Italian poet-philosopher. The argument is derived from the final chapter of my recently completed dissertation on Leopardi’s adoption of a unique and strictly inorganicist form of uniformitarian geological philosophy throughout his poetry and prose.