Ugo Foscolo

Niccolò Ugo Foscolo (Zakynthos, 1778 - London, 1827) was an Italian poet, writer and patriot. Born in the Ionian Islands, then under Venetian rule, he wrote in Italian and knew Latin and ancient Greek well. He matters chiefly for his long poem Dei sepolcri and for an epistolary novel often regarded as the first modern Italian novel.

The son of a Venetian doctor and a Greek mother, he trained in Split and, after his father's death, in Venice and at the University of Padua, where the abbé Melchiorre Cesarotti became his mentor. Around 1795 he changed his given name to Ugo, for reasons that remain unclear. The arrival of the French and the spread of Jacobin ideas drew him into politics. After the fall of the Venetian Republic he addressed an ode to Napoleon, hoping he would end the oligarchy and found a free republic. The Treaty of Campo Formio, which handed Venice to Austria, was a bitter disappointment, though it did not wholly extinguish his hopes.

In 1798 he published The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, a politically charged epistolary novel inspired by Goethe's Werther and by the real suicide of a young student from Padua. He fought with the National Guard, was wounded and taken prisoner, and later took part in plans for a unified Italian government. In 1804 he served in Napoleon's army at Valenciennes. In 1807 he published Dei sepolcri, a poem on the dead and the memory of the homeland, which won him fame as a lyric poet. His chair at Pavia ended after a 1809 inaugural lecture with nationalist undertones displeased Napoleon, who abolished such chairs.

After Napoleon's fall and the Austrian return to Milan, he left Italy in 1815 rather than swear loyalty to the new regime. He passed through Switzerland and reached London in 1816, where liberal circles welcomed him. He wrote for the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review and produced essays on Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante. However, poor financial management and rash speculation brought him debts, a brief spell in debtors' prison in 1824, and a life of poverty, sometimes under a false name. He died at Turnham Green in 1827.

His legacy rests on the poetry of Dei sepolcri, the prose of Jacopo Ortis and his critical work on Italian classics. In 1871, at the request of the King of Italy, his remains were moved to Florence with national mourning honours.