Chapter 3 - London 1817–1819

Summary

To enhance the British appetite for Italian culture beyond Byron’s and Hunt’s engagement with their ‘old friends the Italians’, a figure with sufficient fame in Regency London was required, one who was able to write for the taste-forming medium of the age: the literary periodical. Ugo Foscolo arrived in London in September 1816, and died just outside the capital a decade later. He went to Britain in exile from Austrian-occupied Milan in the last of his many migrations. These began at the age of seven when his family moved from the Venetian protectorate of Zante to Venice, which he subsequently left after the cessation of the Republic in the Treaty of Campoformio (1797). He fled to the Euganean Hills, and then moved to Bologna where he worked as a journalist before spending two years in northern France, serving in Napoleon’s army for the planned invasion of England from 1804 to 1806. Foscolo returned for a short and controversial tenure as the Master of Rhetoric at the University of Pavia, during which he produced the seminal oration Dell’origine e dell’ufficio della letteratura (1809). A relatively settled spell in Milan under the Cisalpine Republic was broken by Austrian occupation; this led to his exile, first in Zurich and then London.