Ugo Foscolo

He is an author of our literature who for his moral greatness and the poetic heights he reached is considered among the highest of all time.

Like all geniuses, it is difficult to place it in a precise era: its unique style, between the Napoleonic era and the first germs of Romanticism, is original and prophetic and is included in the "Pre-Romanticism".

He lived exiled, from one part of Europe to another, when Napoleon betrayed the hopes of the Italian patriots by yielding Venice and his vast possessions to Austria (1797, Treaty of Campoformio).

Foscolo was in fact born in Zakynthos, an island in the Ionian archipelago, from a Venetian father and a Greek mother.

He dedicated a famous sonnet to his island (A Zakynthos, 1803) in which many poetic elements of classicism are proposed, reinvigorated by the romantic theme of nostalgia.