Named for a poem by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), the great poet and philosopher from the Italian Romantic period. Full of astronomical references, his poetry expresses the great sense of bewilderment of post-Copernican man, faced with an infinite variety of worlds of which he is no longer the center, but only infinitesimal and marginal. Nevertheless, the “Ginestra” becomes the symbol of man/flower in the middle of the cosmos/desert, a cosmos sustained by rigid mechanistic laws, indifferent to every desire and human sentiment, existing only to perpetuate the cycle of production and universal destruction. Name suggested and citation prepared by M. Vicoli.