FOSCOLO, UGO. – Poet, born at Zante on 6 February 1778, died at Turnham Green on 10 September 1827. His father, Andrea, was a physician from a Venetian family; his mother was a Greek, Diamantina Spathis. His real name was Niccolò. Orphaned of his father at the age of ten, he spent his childhood and youth in a squalid house in Venice with his mother and siblings. Gifted with an intellect awakened precociously, and with a temperament dominated by an expansive and overbearing “I,” he began his studies at the Seminary of Spalato and continued them at the Murano schools of S. Cipriano and at the University of Padua.
He very soon felt himself called to the “miracle of versification”—as he himself defines poetry—and devoted himself to it with all his soul.
In 1797, already known for his verses published in the Mercurio d’Italia and under suspicion by the government because of their harshly liberal tone, he brought his first tragedy, Tieste, to the stage in Venice. It was dense with political allusions and incited rebellion against the “ruinous old patrician rabble.” At the fall of Venice (1797) he fled to Bologna, greeted Napoleon’s descent into Italy with the ode A Bonaparte liberatore, and enlisted as a volunteer in the Cisalpine legion. Returning to Venice, he assumed the position of provisional secretary of the municipality, revealed himself as an orator at the meetings of the Society of Public Instruction, and threw himself enthusiastically into the political struggle. But in October 1797 Napoleon, with the Treaty of Campoformio, ceded Venice to Austria: from the grief caused by this disappointment would emerge the epistolary novel Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (definitive ed., Milan 1802), echoing Goethe’s I dolori del giovane Werther and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse.
An exile in Milan, he met and admired Parini there, became a friend of Monti, and took over the editorship of the Monitore italiano. In 1799, impelled once more by the need for physical action, he took part in battles against the Austro-Russian forces, was wounded at Cento, followed Massena’s division in the defence of Genoa (1800), and, amid the fighting, composed the ode A Luigia Pollavicini caduta da cavallo; he went to Tuscany with General Pino, returned to Milan, and there wrote the ode All’amica risanata (1802). In 1803 he translated Callimachus’s Chioma di Berenice and published, dedicating it to G. B. Niccolini, the pamphlet Sollicitas oblicia vitae, which contains, among other things, the sonnet Alla sera. In 1804–1806 he was in France with the Italian division; on his return to Milan in 1806 he composed the Sepolcri; in 1807 he printed several experiments in translating the Iliad, according to the principles he would set out in the dissertation Di Omero, del vero modo di tradurre e di portare (1824); in 1808 he left the army and accepted the chair of eloquence at the University of Pavia, where he delivered the celebrated inaugural lecture Dell’origine e dell’ufficio della letteratura and gave the lectures published in 1809.
The abolition of the chair sent him back in 1809 to Milan, and then to Venice, Bologna, and Florence. From this period date the tragedies Ajace (1811) and Ricciardo (1813), his translation of Sterne’s Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick, and the unfinished lyrical poem Le Grazie, dedicated to the statue that stood before the celebrated group and composed in blank hendecasyllables during the three years 1813–15. In it F., drawing upon pure classical beauty, celebrates in Venus the transforming power that led human beings from a savage state to civilization. The three cantos, which have come down to us in fragmentary form, are dedicated to Venus, Vesta, and Pallas respectively: in them, didacticism and the abuse of allegory are compensated for by the perfection of individual scenes, suffused with Hellenic grace.
In 1813 he took up arms again; in 1815, when the Austrians, returning to Milan, offered their former adversary the direction of a newspaper, he refused, and on the evening of 30 March, without a passport, set out into exile: first to Switzerland, then, through Holland, to London. His name, already of European renown, secured him friendships, collaborations, and hospitable receptions in that city. This was the period of his critical withdrawal: with his essays on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, he founded modern literary criticism, directing it “along the paths of history” (Mazzini) and toward the spiritual exploration of individual writers. In 1816 he published the satire Dydymi Clerici prophetae minimi Hypercolipseos liber singularis. He died of dropsy and was buried in the cemetery of Chiswick through the intervention of an English friend. Since 1871 his mortal remains have rested in the Florentine church of S. Croce. His inner portrait is entrusted especially to his work as a writer and to the Epistolario (3 vols., Florence 1859), in which, despite a certain emphasis, the passionate and sincere man throbs.
What above all remains as F.’s lasting achievement are the 295 hendecasyllables of the Sepolcri, composed between March and September 1806 and published at Brescia in 1807. The poet’s entire soul and work in fact revolve around this poem, inspired by English and French sepulchral poetry (Young, Hervey, Gray, Parnel, Delille, Fontanes, Chateaubriand) and written on the occasion of the Saint-Cloud ordinances (12 June 1804, extended to Italy in 1806), which brought the graves of the dead under common regulations by prescribing uniformity in cemeteries. F. rises up in the name of the individual’s right to survive ideally and sentimentally as a link between one age and another, as a driving force of progress, and as a source of comfort to heirs. The “joy of the urn” smiles upon those disappointed in their grief and those overcome by violence; that same tomb which terrifies the coward as the pulverization of what he has believed to be life, and which gives a shudder and dismay to the Sardanapalus “of blessed idleness and food,” becomes a promise of sentimental survival for the creator of affections, for the scientist who contemplates the heavens, and for the hero who breaks himself in a battle fought with honour. Yet the tombs thus become a school of a purely secular and civic morality, lacking any connection with religion and Christian hope, which draw a very different light and strength from the tombs.
F. has on the Index: Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (decree of 19 January 1824), because they present a pessimistic and sceptical epistolary novel in which a lost homeland and a lost love inspire, like a slow but tenacious spur, an ever-growing desire for suicide, ultimately carried out as a means of liberation and peace; La Commedia di Dante Alighieri illustrata (decree of 8 August 1845), because the author uses Dante for an indictment against the Church, transforming the poet into an anti-Catholic dreamer adhering to the new church of “I fedeli d’amore.”
BIBLI: Of the national edition of the works of U. F., volume VII (Lezioni, articoli di critica e di polemica, edited by E. Santini), Florence 1933; VIII (Prue politiche e letterarie, edited by L. Fasso, ibid. 1933); XIV (Epistolario, I, edited by E. Carli, ibid. 1949) have appeared. – Studies: For earlier publications, cf.: A. Ottolini, Bibl. fascicliana, ibid. 1941; M. Fubini, Studi fascicliani, in Leonardo, 1 (1929), pp. 95–104; L. Fasso, Rassegna fascicliana, in Giann. stor. lett. ital., 115 (1940), pp. 58–79. V. moreover: E. Santini, Le lezioni pavesi di U. F., Palermo 1941; C. Verese,
Salvatore Lombardo Restivo