Of the Sepulchres: Foscolo's Poem on Tombs, Memory and Civic Life

Origins: from the Edict of Saint-Cloud to a Venetian salon

Foscolo wrote Of the Sepulchres between the summer and autumn of 1806; the poem reached print in Brescia the following year, 1807, from the presses of Niccolò Bettoni. It began with a specific event: a conversation in the literary salon of Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, where the talk turned to the Edict of Saint-Cloud, the law with which Napoleon regulated burials in June 1804 and which was extended to the Kingdom of Italy in 1806. The edict required cemeteries outside city walls and identical headstones for everyone, erasing the old distinction between an ordinary citizen’s grave and the tomb of a famous man.

The poem grew out of that concrete dispute, dedicated to the Veronese poet Ippolito Pindemonte, who had taken part in the same salon conversation. The historical trigger and the poem’s civic meaning stay on separate but connected tracks: the law was the occasion, the reflection on shared memory is what Foscolo built from it.

Readers of Ugo Foscolo: Life, Exile, and Major Works already know the biographical backdrop to these years: the exile, the teaching post at the University of Pavia, the work as translator and polemicist.

Structure: the four parts of Of the Sepulchres

The text, 295 unrhymed hendecasyllables, unfolds in four movements. In the first, Foscolo challenges the burial law and turns the argument on its head: tombs are not for the dead, who cannot know they exist, but for the living, because they keep an emotional bond with people who are gone. The second movement moves from private affection to the foundations of society: honoring the dead, Foscolo argues, is one of the origins of civilization itself, marking the shift from primitive scattering to a community held together by laws and shared feeling.

The third part widens into the civic and historical value of tombs: Foscolo points to the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, resting place of Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei and Vittorio Alfieri. Visiting those tombs, in his view, means walking through Italian cultural history by way of the people who made it. The fourth and final movement turns to poetry itself: verse, more than a gravestone, keeps memory alive once tombs are worn away by time or destroyed by war.

Practical example: when Foscolo writes that everything is swallowed by forgetting — “involve tutte cose l’oblio nella sua notte” — the very next lines already point to poetry as the force that resists that darkness, able to keep a name alive long after the stone over a grave has crumbled.

Themes: materialism, illusion and civic memory

According to Treccani, the poem rests on a materialist outlook paired with a pessimistic mood: time wears down and transforms everything in the universe, and biological death leaves no way out. From this starting point, illusions still stay alive for Foscolo — love, homeland, the “corrispondenza d’amorosi sensi” between the living and the dead — and they give shared meaning to existence even without a rational basis. Tombs, in this light, become the thread that ties the living to the dead and past centuries to the ones still to come.

That tension between materialism and the need for meaning brings Foscolo close to a later writer, Giacomo Leopardi: Life, Works and the Idea of Cosmic Pessimism, though the two poets land in different places: Leopardi denies almost every form of consolation, while Foscolo finds his in shared memory and in the civic reach of poetry.

Santa Croce and the parallel with Homer

Beyond naming tombs in Florence, the third section of the poem introduces the idea that poetry has a civic and political function, capable of holding a nation together through the names of its great figures. In the fourth part Foscolo pushes that idea to its peak with the Homeric parallel: just as the tombs of the Trojan heroes, Ajax and Hector among them, inspired Homer’s song, the tombs of illustrious Italians can inspire the poets who come after them. Homer becomes the emblem of a poetry that carries an entire people’s history forward, and the poem closes by claiming the same role for early nineteenth-century Italian letters.

Readers of The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis: Plot and Themes of Foscolo’s Novel will recognize some of the same threads already at work in the novel: homeland, the weight of memory, a reckoning with death. In Of the Sepulchres, though, Foscolo trades the novel’s intimate, despairing register for a more public, oratorical one.

Why Of the Sepulchres is considered Foscolo’s masterpiece

The Italian Wikipedia entry calls Of the Sepulchres Foscolo’s most compact and finished work; Treccani goes further: it ranks the poem the highest point reached across Foscolo’s entire poetic output, beyond his lyric poetry alone. Part of that judgment rests on the poem’s stylistic balance: classicist in form and in its references, Homer, mythology, civic oratory, yet already carrying traits Romantic poets would soon prize, from attention to individual feeling and personal memory to a new kind of meditation on death.

A useful comparison is Dante’s Divine Comedy: the structure of the journey, summarized, another work that tackles collective memory through a long poetic journey: where Dante builds an entire afterlife to pass judgment on human history, Foscolo works within 295 lines on a single subject, tombs, to reach a similar conclusion: for Foscolo too, verse is what keeps a tomb’s memory alive over time.