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Ortis is composed of letters written by Jacopo to his friend Lorenzo Alderani; the last chapter is the description of the young man's last hours and suicide written by Lorenzo. The plot is located in the countryside near Padua and takes place between October 1797 and March 1799.
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Italy during the French Revolutionary Wars
The Last Letters of jacopo Ortis takes place during the late eighteenth century, when poverty, banditry, begging, vagrancy, and other social ills grew especially widespread in the Italian states. Such wealth as the country possessed was mainly concentrated in the North or in the cities, whilethe majority of peasants in the agrarian South lived in debt and squalor. Conscious of their country’s ills, many Italian intellectuals and progressives felt that only drastic change would bring about the...
The end of the Venetian Republic
Already by the ninth century, Venice, situated amid lagoons at an oceanic crossroads, had developed itself into a commercial force. It then recognized the authority of the Byzantine Empire, whose decline in the ninth century led to Venice’s own proud emergence as a self-governing city, a status it would maintain for nearly a millennium while one Italian neighbor after another suffered foreign rule. Political power in Venice was concentrated in the hands of an oligarchy of merchant families. N...
THE KINGDOM OF ITALY
While Foscolo’s novel deals only with the two years immediately following the Treaty of Campoformio, it is worth noting that, after becoming First Consul of France in 1799, Napoleon renewed his military campaigns against Austrian forces in Italy, In 1801 the Treaty of Lunéville forced Austria to cede all of its Italian territory, with the exception of Venice, to France. By I8Q5, however, Venice too, along with Istria and Dalmatia, had passed into French hands, becoming part of the Kingdom of...
Plot summary
The Last Letters of jacopo Ortis is written in the form of an epistolary novel. Most of the protagonist’s letters are written to his friend Lorenzo Alderani, whom he meets periodically over the course of the novel. Other letters are addressed to Teresa, the woman Jacopo loves in vain. Occasionally notes and story fragments—written by Jacopo or Lorenzo—interrupt the narrative progression of the letters. Before it begins, Lorenzo informs the reader in an editorial note that Jacopo has died and...
Man without a homeland
Arguably the most distinctive element in The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortisis the protagonist’s continuing anguish over his country’s fate. Exiled from his native Venice after the Austrian occupation, Jacopo wanders through Italy, brooding over its oppression by foreign powers and its inability to defend itself: Jacopo’s recognition of the sheer magnitude of his country’s problems and his personal inability to solve them aggravates his gloom. “Nations devour each other,” he muses, “because no s...
Sources and literary context
Although The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis was partly influenced by Vittorio Alfieri’s tragedies and Lawrence Sterne’s The Sentimental Journey(specifically, the section about Lauretta), the novel mainly shows a strong autobiographical influence. Foscolo’s life did not, it is true, end in a dramatic suicide like that of his protagonist; nonetheless he drew heavily upon his own youthful experiences and emotions in writing his novel. Like many of his countrymen, Foscolo had hoped that the French...
Brand, C. P. Italy and the English Romantics. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1957. Cambon, Glauco. Ugo Foscolo, Poet of Exile. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1980. Cippico, Antonio. The Romantic Age in Italian Literature. London: Philip Lee Warner, 1918. Davis, John, ed. Italy in the Nineteenth Century: 1796-1900. Oxford: Oxford Unive...
Foscolo’s very popular novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802; The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1970) contains a bitter denunciation of that transaction and shows the author’s disgust with Italy’s social and political situation. Some critics consider this story the first modern Italian novel.
Finally he commits suicide. Oops something went wrong: 403. Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis is an epistolary novel written by Ugo Foscolo between 1798 and 1802 and first published later that year. A second edition, with major changes, was published by Foscolo in Zurich (1816) and a third one in London (1817).
Last Letters Of Jacopo Ortis by Ugo Foscolo - The 7155th greatest book of all time. The book is a poignant epistolary novel that delves into the emotional turmoil of a young Italian intellectual, torn between his passionate love for a woman and his despair over the political situation in his homeland.
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Written as an epistolary monologue, Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is a compelling portrayal of a troubled mind. Published here for the first time in the English language, it is presented with Foscolo's highly acclaimed poem, Of Tombs.
Ugo Foscolo's Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis: A Translation on JSTOR. DOUGLAS RADCLIFF-UMSTEAD. Series: Copyright Date: 1970. Published by: University of North Carolina Press, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for its Department of Romance Studies. Pages: 168. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469637303_foscolo. Select all.
