Unopened, in its publisher’s wrappers 

Foscolo, Ugo (1778-1827).

Poesie inedite di Nicolò Ugo Foscolo tratte da un manoscritto originale. Lugano, Giuseppe Ruggia and Co, 1831.

8° (170x104 mm). [8], 87, [1] pages. Original publisher’s wrappers. A very good copy, quires unopened.

First edition, dedicated to his childhood friend Costantino Naranzi, of this collection of early poems by the outstanding Italian writer Ugo Foscolo.

Foscolo had composed these poems during his adolescence and copied them into a notebook which was discovered among his papers and manuscripts after his death.

The collection first appeared in 1831, issued by the press established by Giuseppe Ruggia in the Swiss town of Lugano. Ruggia was a highly interesting protagonist of Italian political diasporas who, like Foscolo, had chosen the path of exile, owing to his radical beliefs and his active role in the Risorgimento.

Foscolo’s youthful poems are still deeply imbued with a rather unoriginal Arcadian style, as their vocabulary, syntax, and metrical structure reveal, far from the spirit of romanticism characteristic of his later production. Nevertheless, some verses do contain the first sparks of his future, and innovative poetics.

Acchiappati 145; Ottolini 443; Mazzola 58.