The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis: Plot and Themes of Foscolo's Novel

Who is Jacopo Ortis, and how the novel came about

Jacopo Ortis is a young Venetian exile, and readers learn his story only through the letters he writes to his friend Lorenzo Alderani. Ugo Foscolo had already sketched an earlier version of the story in 1796, under the title Laura, lettere, never published: a different novel, but the same underlying idea of telling everything through letters. For the full biography of Foscolo, from his early years to his final exile, see the Recap on Ugo Foscolo.

The plot of The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis

The story is set between late 1797 and 1799, the years in which the Republic of Venice was ceded to Austria under the Treaty of Campo Formio. Jacopo takes refuge in the Euganean Hills to escape the political persecution that followed, and there he meets Signor T***, his daughters Teresa and Isabellina, and Odoardo. He falls in love with Teresa, but she is already promised to Odoardo: a love with no way out, woven through a story that ties Jacopo’s private feelings to the collapse of his political hopes.

Practical example: when Jacopo returns to the Euganean Hills and learns that Teresa has married Odoardo, the reader does not hear the news from a narrator describing it from a distance. It reaches the page inside the very letter in which Jacopo tells Lorenzo, his emotion tangled up with the fact itself. That is the epistolary novel’s signature effect: nothing stands between the event and the person recounting it, so the reader feels the shock at the same moment the protagonist does.

Jacopo flees across Italy, then returns to the Euganean Hills. Once every possibility with Teresa is closed off, he takes his own life with a dagger to the heart, driven to despair by his lost love and by the collapse of the hopes for freedom tied to the Treaty of Campo Formio.

The letters of Jacopo Ortis: one voice, one recipient

The novel has no outside narrator: every letter Jacopo Ortis writes is addressed to a single friend, Lorenzo Alderani, and readers learn about Teresa, Odoardo and everything else in the story only through what Jacopo chooses to put on the page. No reply from Lorenzo ever appears in the text. In September 1798 Foscolo began publishing the novel through the Bolognese bookseller Jacopo Marsigli, but the printing stopped at the forty-fifth letter. Marsigli then handed the task of finishing it to another writer, the Bolognese Angelo Sassoli, who published it anyway, without Foscolo’s knowledge. Foscolo only found out afterward, and called that text a “hodgepodge of romantic follies, doctored phrases and cowardly notes”; he published his public rejection of it on 3 January 1801 in the Gazzetta di Firenze, and again on 17 March in the Monitore di Bologna.

Themes and inspiration: love, exile, civic anger

Three threads hold the novel together: the unhappy love for Teresa, the political exile that followed the fall of the Republic of Venice, and the civic anger of a young man watching the hopes raised by the French Revolution betrayed. The steps that led to the Treaty of Campo Formio are covered in the Recap on the French Revolution, which traces the events that redrew the political map of Europe, Italy included.

In both form and content, the novel sits close to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774: there too a young man tells his own story only through letters, and scholars have long pointed to that novel as Foscolo’s model. A few decades later another Italian author, Giacomo Leopardi, reaches an equally bleak outlook by a different route, through philosophical reflection on the human condition.

The editions: from an unfinished text to the definitive novel

After disowning the Sassoli edition, Foscolo published his own authorized version the following year, in 1802, in Milan and at his own expense. That was not the end of the story: the novel came back under his pen for one last, extensive revision, published in Zurich in 1816 and in London in 1817, by then during his years of exile. That is the version readers know.

The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis remains an unusual case in the history of the Italian novel: it arrives before the genre truly took hold in the country, in a form, the epistolary novel, that no other major nineteenth-century Italian novel would take up in the same way again. It would fall to a different work, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, to become the reference point for the Italian novel a few decades later, but with an outside narrator and a completely different structure.