UGO FOSCOLO — Poet. Born at Zante on 6 Feb. 1778, died at Turnham Green on 10 Sept. 1827. His father, Andrea, was a Venetian family physician; his mother, a Greek woman named Diamantina Spathis. His real name was Niccolò. Orphaned at ten, he spent his childhood and youth in a squalid house in Venice with his mother and siblings. A precocious intellect, his temperament dominated by an expansive and overbearing ‘ego’, he began his studies at the seminary in Spalato and continued them in the Murano schools of S. Cipriano and at the University of Padua.
He felt himself called at an early age to the ‘miracle of versification’—as he himself defined poetry—and devoted himself to it wholeheartedly.
In 1797, already known for the verses he had published in the Mercure de France and under suspicion by the government for his sharply liberal tone, he staged in Venice his first tragedy, Tieste, dense with political allusions and inciting rebellion against the ‘ruinous old patrician rabble’. With the fall of Venice (1797), he fled to Bologna and greeted Napoleon’s descent upon Italy with the cry *Ode to Bonaparte the Liberator*; he then enlisted as a volunteer in the Cispadane Legion. Returning to Venice, he assumed the post of provisional secretary to the municipality, distinguished himself as an orator in the halls of the Society for Public Instruction, and threw himself wholeheartedly into political struggle. But in October 1797, Napoleon, through the Treaty of Campoformio, ceded Venice to Austria. From his grief at this disappointment there emerged the epistolary novel *The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis* (definitive edition, Milan 1802), echoing Goethe’s *The Sorrows of Young Werther* and Rousseau’s *Julie, or the New Heloise*.
In exile in Milan, he met and admired Parini, became a friend of Monti, and took over the editorship of the *Monitore italiano*. In 1799, driven by a need for physical action, he took part in battles against the Austro-Russians, was wounded at Cento, followed Masséna’s division in the defense of Genoa (1800), and composed, amid the clash of arms, the *Ode to Luigia Pallavicini Fallen from her Horse*; he went to Tuscany with General Pino, returned to Milan, and there wrote the *Ode to the Ancient Rejuvenated* (1802). In 1803 he translated Callimachus’ *Berenice* and published, dedicated to G. B. Niccolini, the pamphlet *Sollicita obliata vitae*, which includes, among other works, the sonnet *To Evening*. In 1804–1806 he was in France with the Italian division; his return to Milan in 1806 saw the composition of *The Sepulchres*; in 1807 he published some experiments in translation from the *Iliad*, according to the principles he would set forth in his dissertation *On Homer, on the True Manner of Translating and of Poetizing* (1824); in 1808 he left the army and took up the chair of Eloquence at the University of Pavia, where he delivered his celebrated inaugural lecture *On the Origin and Office of Literature* and held the public lectures later published in 1809.
The suppression of the chair in 1809 drove him from Pavia to Milan, then to Venice, Bologna, and Florence. From this period date the tragedies *Ajax* (1811) and *Ricciarda* (1813), the translation of Sterne’s *A Sentimental Journey*, and the unfinished lyric poem *The Graces*, dedicated to the vice that attended the celebrated group and composed in hendecasyllabic verse during the years 1813–15. In it, drawing on pure classical beauty, Foscolo sings in Venus the transformative power of humanity from a savage state to one of civilization. The three hymns, which survive only in fragments, are entitled *To Venus*, *To Vesta*, and *To Pallas*: in them the abuse of allegory is dissolved, and compensation is found in the perfection of individual tableaux suffused with Hellenic grace.
In 1813 he took up arms again; in 1815, when the Austrians re-entered Milan and offered the former opponent the direction of a newspaper, he refused. On the evening of 30 March, without a passport, he set out into exile: first to Switzerland, then, via Holland, to London. His name, already famous across Europe, procured him in that city friendships, collaborations, and hospitable welcomes. It was a time of critical introspection: 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 deepening of individual writers. In 1816 he published the satire *Dydymi Clerici Profetae Minimi Hypercalypseos Liber Singularis*. He died of dropsy and was buried in the cemetery at Chiswick through the efforts of an English friend. Since 1817 his mortal remains have rested in the Florentine temple of Santa Croce. His inner portrait is entrusted especially to his work as a writer and to his *Epistolario* (3 vols., Florence 1859), in which, despite a certain rhetorical flourish, the passionate and sincere man still palpably lives.
What above all remains established of Foscolo are the 295 hendecasyllables of *The Sepulchres*, composed in March–September 1806 and published in Brescia in 1807. The entire soul and work of the poet revolve around this poem, inspired by English and French sepulchral poetry (Young, Hervey, Gray, Parnell, Delille, Fontanes, Chateaubriand) and written in response to the decrees of Saint-Cloud (12 June 1804, extended to Italy in 1806), which prescribed uniformity in cemeteries and the common burial of the dead. Foscolo rises in defense of the right of personality to survive ideally and emotionally as a link between one age and another, as a driving force for progress, as a source of comfort to heirs. The ‘joy of the urn’ smiles upon those bowed in grief and upon the oppressed by violence; that same tomb which terrifies the coward as the pulverization of what he has deemed life, which sends a shudder through the ‘Sardanapalus of blessed leisure and feasting’, becomes a promise of emotional survival for the creator of affections, for the scientist who contemplates the heavens, for the hero who breaks in battle fought selflessly. Yet the tombs thus become a school of a morality that is merely secular and civic, devoid of any connection with religion and Christian hope, which would cast a far different light and power upon the tombs.
Foscolo’s works placed on the Index are: *The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis* (decree of 19 Jan. 1824), because they form a pessimistic and skeptical epistolary novel in which the lost homeland and a lost love inspire, like a slow but tenacious poison, an ever-growing desire for suicide, carried out at last as a means of liberation and peace; *Dante’s Divine Comedy Illustrated* (decree of 8 Aug. 1845), because the author uses Dante to mount a requisition against the Church, transforming the poet into an anti-clerical dreamer, adherent to the new church of ‘the faithful of love’.
Located in the province of Cuneo, it comprises the territory extending to the left of the Stura River, at the intersection of the railway line and the state roads connecting Turin with Ventimiglia and Savona, important for commerce and industry. Covering an area of 264 sq. km., it has 39,000 inhabitants, all Catholic, 30 parishes, 7 chaplaincies, over 200 churches and oratories, 88 diocesan and 10 regular priests, numerous educational and welfare institutions, a major and minor seminary, the latter attached to the house of exercises at the well-known sanctuary of Cussano (3 km from F.), built in 1872 on the site of the Augustinian convent church (17th cent.), dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Divine Providence, in memory of the double miraculous apparition to a deaf-mute (1527). Patron: St. Juvenal, bishop of Narni, where he died in 376. Feast day: May 3.
History. — The body of the Saint, stolen and abandoned near F. by a canon of Toulouse, was found about 1220 and deposited in the collegiate church of Romanisio, a village of Roman origin. After F. was constituted as a commune (1236), the inhabitants of Romanisio moved there with the collegiate church, and on 29 Dec. 1279 they brought the relics of the Saint, adding his name to the church of St. Mary.
After passing under the rule of Marquis Manfred IV of Saluzzo (1304), of Charles II of Anjou (1307), and again of Saluzzo (1314), F. entered by pact of submission into the domain of Prince Philip of Savoy-Acaya (who built the four-towered castle from 1324 to 1332). With the extinction of the Acaya line in 1418, F. passed directly to Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy from 1416. After the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), F., remaining constantly loyal to the House of Savoy and escaping French occupation in 1536, 1553, and 1557, received on 9 Oct. 1560 Duke Emmanuel Philibert, who granted it the title of city and the coat of arms with the motto *Fidelitatis insignia* (20 Feb. 1566) and began the process to have it erected as a bishopric. The first three bishops appointed died before the negotiations, which lasted over 30 years, were completed; finally Charles Emmanuel I proposed Msgr. Camillo Daddio of Mondovì, and Pope Clement VIII provided (15 Apr. 1592) by erecting the collegiate church of St. Mary and St. Juvenal as the cathedral and detaching 15 parishes from Turin and 4 from Asti. Twelve bishops succeeded one another with only one interruption (1701–27) until the suppression of the diocese on 12 Aug. 1803, following the Concordat between Pius VII and Napoleon, by which it was aggregated to that of Mondovì. The diocese was reconstituted on 17 July 1817 by the same Pius VII at the request of Victor Emmanuel I, but
Fossano, Diocese of — Castle of the Princes of Acaya (1314).
(photo by Gelere - Tarlho)