Ugo Foscolo (Zakynthos 1778 – London 1827), born Niccolò Foscolo, Italian writer and poet, was born on the Ionian island of Zakynthos, then under Venetian rule. In 1792 his family moved to Venice, where he studied Italian and Greek literature, started to write poems, and was introduced to the city’s leading literary salons (of Giustina Renier Michiel and of the Greek-Venetian writer Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi). Both salons were frequented by well-known writers, including Madame de Staël and Byron.

In 1797 Foscolo’s ode A Bonaparte liberatore was published, hailing Napoleon as a liberator from the Venetian oligarchy and instigator of a free republic. The cession of Venice to the Austrians disabused him; going into voluntary exile, first to Florence, then to Milan, he began his novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (“The last letters of Jacopo Ortis”, completed and published in 1802), whose protagonist focalizes Foscolo’s own disgust with Italy’s social and political situation.

While in Milan Foscolo joined the Club dei Giacobini (“Society of Jacobins”), with some of whose members he formed the editorial board of the Monitore Italiane; Foscolo’s own contributions evince his revolutionary patriotism. In 1798, he moved to Bologna, where together with his brother he founded Il Genio democratico (later merged into the Monitore Bologna)

With the Austrians and Russians invading Italy in 1799, Foscolo, despite his earlier disappointment, joined the French side and in 1804 was sent to serve in France. He was able to continue his literary activities and, among other things, translated the Iliad and Sterne’s Sentimental journey. In 1806, after the Austrian defeat, Foscolo returned to Venice and Milan, where he met Alessandro Manzoni and published Dei sepolcri (“Of the sepulchres”, 1807), a patriotic protest poem against Napoleon’s ban on tomb inscriptions. Foscolo, asserting that the Italian community can identify neither with its ancien régime nor with the Napoleonic system, fixes his hopes on a national futurity, inspired by the tombs and monuments of the great men from the past. The poem earned him the chair of Italian rhetoric at the University of Pavia. In his inaugural lecture “On the origin and duty of literature”, Foscolo emphasized that the key function of literature was to create national awareness. His position at the university was short-lived as the chair was abolished by Napoleon the next year.

After Napoleon’s downfall and the return of Austrian rule in 1814, Foscolo refused to take the oath of allegiance. He moved to Switzerland and, in 1816, to England, where he wrote commentaries for The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review. He died in London, in 1827. A national ceremony was held when his remains were moved from England to Santa Croce in Florence in 1871.