Ugo Foscolo: Life, Exile, and Major Works

From Zante to Venice

Ugo Foscolo was born on Zante, an island in the Ionian archipelago then under Venetian rule, on 6 February 1778 (by the Gregorian calendar used by Treccani; the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica gives 26 January under the Julian calendar then still followed in some English-language sources — it is the same day). In 1792 his family settled together in Venice, in a modest house in campo delle Gatte, and there Foscolo continued his studies, also attending the University of Padua.

These were the years in which Europe was shaken by the upheavals set off by the French Revolution, which within a few years reached Venice as well. In 1797 the Republic of Venice fell, and Foscolo’s life changed course: in the last ten days of April he left the city and sought refuge in the Cispadane Republic, then, around mid-November, moved to Milan. During this period he served as a volunteer in the French army, taking part in the battle of the Trebbia and the siege of Genoa.

The major works

Between September and December 1798, and in the first months of the following year, the epistolary novel Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis was printed: the story of a young man who recounts his own unrest, torn between impossible love and political disillusionment. Here it is enough to place it within the biography: its plot and themes are covered in the dedicated Recap on Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis.

Real-world example: students who study Foscolo in school often mix up the timeline, assuming his English exile and Jacopo Ortis belong to the same period. They don’t: the novel came out in 1798-99, when Foscolo was twenty, while his exile in London only began in 1816, nearly two decades later.

In 1803 Foscolo collected in a single volume the Odes To Luigia Pallavicini, Fallen from Her Horse and To His Convalescent Friend, together with 12 sonnets, including On the Death of His Brother Giovanni, To Zacynthus, and To Evening. Around the same time, possibly as early as 1803, he began working on The Graces, a short poem planned as three hymns dedicated to Venus, Vesta, and Pallas — a project that, even drawing on earlier fragments, he would never bring to completion.

In April 1807 came the high points of this phase: the poem Of the Sepulchres and the Experiment in Translating the Iliad. The poem, covered in detail in the Recap on Of the Sepulchres, sets out to stir the political emulation of Italians through the example of nations that honour the memory and the graves of their great men — a theme that ties together the cult of memory and civic indignation, and that anticipates the patriotic sensibility of authors such as Alessandro Manzoni, whose temperament and style remained quite different from his own.

Exile and the London years

On the night of 30-31 March 1815, Foscolo left Milan bound for Switzerland. On 1 April he reached Lugano, on 4 April he passed through Roveredo, in the Grisons. In November of the same year he gathered and annotated a series of Italian sonnets, shortly before leaving the continent: on 12 September 1816 he arrived in London and took lodgings at the Sablonière Hotel, in Leicester Square.

In London, Foscolo spent eleven years, until his death on the evening of 10 September 1827 (this is the date given by Treccani; a nineteenth-century source, the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, instead gives 10 October, a discrepancy that looks like an error in that entry). The English public, according to the sources consulted, admired his literary fame but honoured above all the patriot and the free man — an exile’s identity that Foscolo carried to the end, and that places him, a man without a country, among the first to sense the need for Italian unification, a theme that would become central with the unification of Italy a few decades later.

Only in 1871 were his remains brought back to Italy and buried in the basilica of Santa Croce, in Florence.

Between Neoclassicism and Pre-Romanticism

Foscolo’s work grows out of a deep commitment to Neoclassical ideals, which entrust to poetic language the power to resist the passing of time — a conviction that was far from superficial, and that drew support from his meditation on Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. At the same time, themes such as exile and civic indignation, along with figures like Thyestes in one of his tragedies, carry traits that critics describe as Pre-Romantic.

For this reason critics place Foscolo between the fading of Enlightenment rationalism and the first stirrings of Romantic taste, in the same years Giacomo Leopardi was writing. The same tension between taking refuge in the classical past and facing discontent with the present runs through his work, and remains one of the reasons Foscolo is still read as a bridge author between two literary eras.