Polemist and Journalist in Milan
After the end of the experience in Pavia, he returned to Milan to start a two-year period packed with literary polemics and contrasts that led to Foscolo's definitive rift with the environment of the Milanese literary figures close to the Napoleonic regime. The university lectures, followed by many young people with success, had raised the suspicions of the world of political power and of the literary figures subjugated to the government (Vincenzo Monti first and foremost) who the writer attacked severely in his lectures, albeit indirectly.
Foscolo entrusted his polemical attacks to the “Annali di Scienze e Lettere” a journal edited by a scientist from Parma, Giovanni Rasori, and by Michele Leoni, who worked with a group of young emulators of the poet, including Pietro Borsieri and the brothers Luigi and Silvio Pellico. Foscolo criticized Homer's translators, from Antonio Maria Salvini to Melchiorre Cesarotti and Monti himself in a review of Traduzione de’ Due Primi Canti dell’Odissea (Translation of the First Two Books of the Odyssey) by Ippolito Pindemonte in a journal entitled On the Translation of the Odyssey, and he also launched veiled attacks on many contemporary figures who could recognize themselves easily in the poet's allusions. Ragguaglio di un’Adunanza de’ Pittagorici, published in June 1810, was even more biting.
The writers' rivals answered from the pages of “Poligrafo”, which as edited by Luigi Lamberti, where literary figure and journalist Urbano Lampredi published a series of articles in the summer of 1811 that disputed the contents of the Pavia inaugural lecture; attacks on Foscolo, often fuelled by Vincenzo Monti, also appeared in newspapers such as “Corriere delle Dame” and “Corriere Milanese” that were loyal to the regime's cultural policy. In this climate, the failure of Ajace, which was staged at La Scala in December 1811, was a pretext for an ulterior series of articles by Lampredi published in “Poligrafo” criticizing Foscolo's tragedy, which was soon banned.
