The First 'Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis'

This past weekend (on 6 February), marked the birthday of the famous poet-soldier Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827). In light of this anniversary and upcoming Valentine’s Day, we are highlighting today the poet’s celebrated tragic love story, the Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis), presented here in the extremely rare first edition, in the 'Austrian' issue known as '1799A'.

Foscolo's Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis is a tragic semi-autobiographical work that tells the tale of two great loves. In epistolary form, it narrates the love story between the young patriot Jacopo Ortis and a girl named Teresa and, set against a backdrop of the Napoleonic wars in northern Italy, it tells of the protagonist’s persistent love of country despite an increasingly doomed national and political situation. It is a very sad tale, for just as Jacopo is ultimately never to marry Teresa, so he is unable to return to his homeland, and sentimental disappointment and political disillusionment finally overwhelm the young Jacopo. Over the course of the novel, the letters are written by Jacopo to his friend Lorenzo Alderani, who takes up the pen in the epilogue to explain Jacopo’s final hours and tragic suicide.

Foscolo, Ugo (1778-1827). Vera storia di due amanti infelici, ossia Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis.… [Bologna, Jacopo Marsigli, 1799].

See the full description of this copy here.

The story is a self-portrait, of sorts, of Foscolo’s own youth. Born to a Greek mother and a Venetian father on the Greek island of Zante—then still under Venetian rule—Foscolo moved with his family to Venice around 1793. By 1797 he had made a name for himself with the tragedy Tieste, and that same year he wrote A Bonaparte liberatore, an ode to Napoleon whom he hoped would overthrow the Venetian oligarchy then in control of his beloved homeland. Instead, with the Treaty of Campo Formio of October 1797, Napoleon handed Venice over to the Austrian Empire and definitively ended its thousand-year status as an independent republic.

The Treaty of Campo Formio is also the beginning of the story in Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Just as Foscolo then fled Venice to avoid persecution by the pro-Austrian police, so too does Jacopo fear for his safety, and he runs to the Euganean Hills where he meets and falls in love with Teresa. Although in love with Jacopo, Teresa is engaged to the wealthy (but dull) Odoardo, a match firmly espoused by her father, who is suffering under his own economic and political pressures. Teresa thus ultimately turns down Jacopo who proceeds to visit throughout Italy, contemplating its situation and his own before deciding on the final act of suicide as liberation from both.

The story of the suicide of a student in Padua named Gerolamo Ortis influenced Foscolo, as no doubt did Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), published in 1744, in which the protagonist meets a similar fate. (Closer to home, Foscolo’s brother Giovanni, tragically committed suicide as well, in 1801). Goethe’s story also tells the tale of doomed love, although for Werther it is unrequited while for Jacopo it is forbidden in a way that aptly reflects the additional political context at play in Foscolo’s tale as compared to Goethe’s.

After fleeing from Venice, Foscolo joined the French Cisalpine army and had two love affairs that ultimately influenced the Jacopo Ortis. On a military mission to Florence he met and fell in love with ‘the divine maid’, Isabella Roncioni, who, like Teresa, was engaged and their love could not continue. Their correspondence, however, is reflected in the novel, as was his correspondence with his subsequent lover, Antoniette Fagnani Arese. Signing letters “Il tuo Ortis,” Foscolo clearly identified with his protagonist in a Romantic fusion of art and life. This went both ways. In response to Arese’s ultimate infidelity, for example, Foscolo called her “a feminine Lovelace,” referring to a character in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, published in 1748. As Cambon observes, this latter, “along with Pamela, had started in eighteenth-century Europe the clamorous tradition of the epistolary novel. That tradition of course included, in a straight line of succession, Rousseau's La nouvelle Heloise [sic], Goethe's Werther, and Foscolo's own Jacopo Ortis.” (Ugo Foscolo: Poet of Exile, p. 29).

Notably, however, the early copy presented here predates Foscolo’s meeting with Arese, representing instead a critical moment in the history of the text as well as of Foscolo himself—indeed, in the great fusion of art and life that fueled Foscolo’s Romantic spirit.

The work has a very complex publishing history, in which issue 1799A plays a fundamental role. Foscolo had been writing the work between the summer of 1798 and the beginning of the following year, and it was set to be published by the Bolognese printer Jacopo Marsigli. Foscolo then joined the Napoleonic Army, interrupting the text at letter forty-five. Marsigli, the printer, decided to assemble the material regardless, and he asked the young law student Angelo Sassoli (b. 1773) to continue writing the story up until the epilogue. The book came to light – under the title Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis – around 30 June 1799, although the title-page bears the year '1798 Anno vii' as the date of publication. This first issue, known as Ortis 1798, was evidently not distributed: only three complete copies are recorded, these being preserved in the Archiginnasio in Bologna, the Biblioteca di Storia moderna e contemporanea in Rome, and the Biblioteca Comunale in Treviso.

At the same time, the city of Bologna was occupied by the Austrian army, and Marsigli attempted to conform his still undistributed publication, which was replete with political statements and references to religious questions, to the new political context. In order to overcome the reactionary Austrian control he assembled a 'new Ortis' – known as issue 1799A – which appeared on the market around August 1799 under the more 'reassuring' title of Vera storia di due amanti infelici, ossia Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The True Story of Two Unhappy Lovers, i.e., The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis). Marsigli re-used the 1798 quires containing the Foscolo-Sassoli text, and organised the Letters into two parts, each of which was preceded by new preliminaries, including the Annotazioni, a sort of 'justification' of what could be considered suspicious. He also eliminated the more delicate or dangerous passages of the Ortis 1798, inserting instead substitute bifolia or single leaves (cancels). After Napoleon's victory in Marengo on 14 June 1800, the French government was restored in Bologna, and the enterprising Marsigli decided to distribute a third and more 'revolutionary' issue of Foscolo's work – issue 1799B –, assembling copies and leaves from the two previous issues, Ortis 1798 and 1799A.

Foscolo had been unaware of Marsigli's various attempts at publishing his epistolary novel; it was only in September 1800 that he came into possession of a copy of the Ortis, in its 1799B iteration. The publication was, however, firmly refuted by Foscolo as being not his own work, and thus the 'official' edition appeared only in 1802. “The editorial history of this novel is controversial and partly conjectural, with some aspects still shrouded in darkness [...] Although recent scholarship tends to see Foscolo's contribution greater than he cared to admit, the question of how much can be attributed to him and how much to others is still debated [...] Marsigli himself was involved more than one would expect of a publisher, being most probably responsible for assembling the material and filling in some of the gaps” (R. Loretelli, “Fleurons as Temporal Markers in Richardson and Foscolo”, p. 150).

 The present copy is in the rare 1799A or 'Austrian' issue, with the following issue points – as noted by Gambarin – being observed: the novel is divided into two parts, both with new title-pages bearing the different, aforementioned title. In the first part, an additional quire was inserted for the new preliminaries, including the Avviso a chi legge (fol. [π]2; replacing the shorter address of Ortis 1798 Al lettore, signed by Lorenzo F.), the preface Lorenzo F. Al sensibile Lettore (fol. a1) and Annotazioni Alla prima parte delle ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis indispensabilmente da Leggersi (fol. a2). At the beginning of the second part, following the new title-page, are four unnumbered pages containing the Annotazioni Alla seconda parte delle ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis indispensabilmente da Leggersi. In this copy the title-page and the four-page Annotazioni are preceded by a blank leaf, forming a quire of four leaves (χ4), a feature unrecorded in the bibliographies.

Overall, in the 1799A issue, fourteen leaves are cancels, single leaves variously pasted over the stubs of the cancellands, or bifolia inserted into the quires. In this copy, the leaf signed e5 is taken from the original Ortis 1798 (cancelland, bearing on page 74 the misprints 'lampi lampi' and 'gi à') and not a cancel (with the corrected 'lampi' and 'già'), as is normally found in other recorded copies of the 1799A. This particular feature was also described in 1955 by Limentani in his paper “Ancora sulle prime edizioni delle Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis” with regard to his own copy of the 1799A, suggesting that the volume offered here may in fact be the same copy that was once in the hands of that Foscolo scholar.

Only two copies of the Ortis 1799 first edition are preserved in American libraries, one held in the Houghton Library at Harvard (1799B); and one, from the Ferrara collection of Renzo Bonfiglioli (1904-1963) and without any indication of issue (A or B), which is held in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

References 

Raccolta Foscoliana Acchiappati, 19; Ottolini 55; Limentani (“oltremodo rara edizione”); G. Gambarin, “Introduzione” to U. Foscolo, Edizione Nazionale, Firenze 1955, IV, pp. XII-XXXV; U. Limentani, “Ancora sulle prime edizioni delle Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis”, La Bibliofilia 57, (1955), pp. 156-160; G. Cambon, Ugo Foscolo: Poet of Exile, Princeton 1980; M. A. Terzoli, Le prime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Un giallo editoriale tra politica e censura, Roma 2004; R. Loretelli, “The Space of Time. Fleurons as Temporal Markers in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Ugo Foscolo's Ortis”, R. Loretelli - F. O'Gorman (eds.), Britain and Italy in the Long Eighteenth Century: Literary and Art Theories, Newcastle Upon Tyne 2010, pp. 144-155; Philobiblon, One Thousand Years of Bibliophily, no. 258.

How to cite this information

Julia Stimac and Margherita Palumbo, “The First 'Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis',” PRPH Books, 10 February 2021, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/ortis. Accessed [date].

This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.