Introduction

Ugo Foscolo was born in 1778 on the island of Zante, a Ionian Venetian dominion, to Andrea Fosco and Diamantina Spatis. After his father's death he moved to Venice, where his mother had already re-located part of the family, and there the fifteen-year-old Foscolo starts his literary, intellectual, and sentimental education. The years 1804-06 see him again enrolled in the Italian Division of Napoleon's army for the cross-Channel invasion of England. He resides mostly in Valenciennes and Boulogne-sur-Mer. In France he meets a young English woman, Fanny Hamilton, with whom he fathers a daughter, Floriana. In 1812 Foscolo moves to Tuscany, and in Florence is a regular guest of the Countess of Albany's salon. The Tuscan sojourn represents a moment of great creativity far from Milanese literary quarrels. In September 1816 Foscolo leaves Switzerland and boards a ship that will take him to England where he spends the last eleven years of his life without ever returning to Italy.