Niccolo Machiavelli Peter Bondanella Mar Popular Books

Niccolo Machiavelli Peter Bondanella Mar Biography & Facts

Ugo Foscolo (Italian: [ˈuːɡo ˈfoskolo, fɔs-]; 6 February 1778 – 10 September 1827), born Niccolò Foscolo, was a Greek-Italian writer, revolutionary and poet. He is especially remembered for his 1807 long poem Dei Sepolcri. Early life Foscolo was born in Zakynthos in the Ionian Islands. His father Andrea Foscolo was an impoverished Venetian nobleman, and his mother Diamantina Spathis was Greek. In 1788, upon the death of his father, who worked as a physician in Spalato (present-day Split, Croatia), the family moved to Venice, and Foscolo completed the studies he began at the Dalmatian grammar school at the University of Padua. Amongst his Paduan teachers was the Abbé Melchiore Cesarotti, whose version of Ossian was very popular in Italy, and who influenced Foscolo's literary tastes; he knew both modern and Ancient Greek. His literary ambition revealed itself in the appearance in 1797 of his tragedy Tieste—a production that enjoyed a certain degree of success. Politics and poetry Foscolo, who, for unknown reasons, had changed his Christian name Niccolò to that of Ugo, began to take an active part in the stormy political discussions which the fall of the Republic of Venice had triggered. He was a prominent member of the national committees, and addressed an ode to Napoleon, expecting Napoleon to overthrow the Venetian oligarchy and create a free republic. The Treaty of Campo Formio (17 October 1797), under which, the French having indeed forced the dissolution of the ancient Republic of Venice, then handed over the city and the Veneto to the Austrians (in exchange for the Austrian Netherlands) gave a rude shock to Foscolo, but did not quite destroy his hopes. The state of mind produced by that shock is reflected in his novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798), which was described by the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica as a more politicized version of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther: "for Foscolo's hero embodies the mental sufferings and suicide of an undeceived Italian patriot just as Goethe's hero places before us the too-delicate sensitiveness, embittering and at last cutting short the life of a private German scholar." The story of Foscolo's novel, The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis had a groundwork of melancholy fact. Jacopo Ortis had been a real person; he was a young student from Padua, and committed suicide there under circumstances akin to those described by Foscolo. Foscolo, like many of his contemporaries, had thought much about suicide. Cato the Younger and the many classical examples of self-destruction described in Plutarch's Lives appealed to the imaginations of young Italian patriots as they had to the heroes and heroines of the Gironde in France. In the case of Foscolo, as in that of Goethe, the effect produced on the writer's mind by the composition of the work seems to have been beneficial. He had seen the ideal of a great national future rudely shattered; but he did not despair of his country, and sought relief in now turning to gaze on the ideal of a great national poet. After the fall of Venice, Foscolo moved to Milan, where he formed a friendship with the older poet Giuseppe Parini, whom he later remembered with admiration and gratitude. In Milan, he published a selection of 12 Sonnets, blending the passionate sentiments shown in "Ortis" with classical control of language and rhythm. Still hoping that his country would be freed by Napoleon, in 1799 Foscolo enlisted as a volunteer in the National Guard of Napoleon's Cisalpine Republic, was wounded at Cento, near Bologna, and taken as prisoner to Modena. Liberated after the French armies took Modena, he took part in the battle of the Trebbia (1799) and was wounded again in defence of the siege of Genoa (1800). Following the battle of Marengo (1800), he returned to Milan, and there gave the last touches to his "Ortis", published a translation of and commentary upon Callimachus, commenced a version of the Iliad and began his translation of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. He also took part in a failed memorandum intended to present a new model of unified Italian government to Napoleon. In 1804, Foscolo returned to military service in Napoleon's cause, attached to the Italian Division of Napoleon's army, based in Boulogne-sur-Mer, as part of Napoleon's invasion force against Britain. Foscolo himself was stationed in Valenciennes, where he fathered a child by a Scottish noblewoman, Lady Fanny Emerytt Hamilton, a granddaughter of the 5th Earl of Leven. Following the defeat at Trafalgar (1805) and Napoleon's abandonment of his plans for invasion, Foscolo returned to Italy in 1806. Before leaving France, however, Foscolo once again met Alessandro Manzoni in Paris. Some seven years younger, Manzoni was still living in the house of his mother Giulia Beccaria. Studies have noted very close analogies (textual, metrical and biographical) between the poetry of Foscolo and Manzoni in the period 1801 to 1803, such as those between Foscolo's All'amica risanata ("To the healed friend"), an ode to Antonietta Fagnani Arese, and Manzoni's Qual su le cinzie cime ("Who, on the peaks of Cynthus") In 1807, occasioned by Napoleon's 1804 decree forbidding burials within city limits, Foscolo wrote his Dei Sepolcri ("On Sepulchres"), which may be described as his sublime effort to seek refuge in the past from the misery of the present and the darkness of the future. The mighty dead are summoned from their tombs, as ages before they had been in the masterpieces of Greek oratory, to fight again the battles of their country. In January 1809, Foscolo was appointed to the chair of Italian rhetoric at the University of Pavia. In Pavia, Foscolo resided at the Palazzo Cornazzani, later home to Contardo Ferrini, to Ada Negri and to Albert Einstein, respectively. His inaugural lecture "On the origin and duty of literature", was conceived in the same spirit as his Dei Sepolcri. In his lecture, Foscolo urged his young countrymen to study literature, not in obedience to academic traditions, but in their relation to individual and national life and growth. The sensation produced by this lecture played no small part in provoking the decree of Napoleon by which the chair of rhetoric was abolished in all the Italian universities under Napoleonic control. Soon afterwards, in 1811 Foscolo's tragedy of Ajax was presented at Milan, with little success; and because of its supposed allusions to Napoleon, he was forced in 1812 to move from Milan to Tuscany. The chief fruits of his stay in Florence were the tragedy of Ricciarda, the Ode to the Graces, left unfinished, and the completion of his translation of Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey, including his own fictional memoir Notizia intorno a Didimo Chierico ("News concerning Didymus the cleric") (1813), covering much of the same ground as that of Sterne's main character, the Reverend Yorick; which he (Foscolo) had begun duri.... Discover the Niccolo Machiavelli Peter Bondanella Mar popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Niccolo Machiavelli Peter Bondanella Mar books.