Zante

Foscolo was born on Zante on February 6 1778; he was given the name of his paternal grandfather, Niccolò, to which a second name, Ugo, was subsequently added and became preferred. His father, Andrea Foscolo, came from an old Venetian family, perhaps of noble origins although impoverished, that had moved for a number of generations to the Venetian colonies in Dalmatia and Greece; Andrea was a ship doctor in the Venetian navy at the time of the birth of his son at Zante (which is called Zacinto in the sonnet Né più mai toccherò le sacre sponde), an Ionian island not far from the coast of the Peloponnese. His mother, Diamantina Spathis, who was a widow from a previous marriage, was Greek; her family lived on a number of different Ionian islands. After the first child, three others were born: Rubina in 1779, Gian Dionisio (Giovanni) in 1781 and Costantino Angelo (Giulio) in 1787, both of whom died by committing suicide. Ugo learned modern Greek from his mother; he also knew Venetian, albeit the contaminated version of the colonies, while, as he himself said, he "stammered" Italian and only learned the language properly after his arrival in Venice. In Foscolo's memory Zante always represented the ideal homeland, a place of family affection and harmony with nature; in his years of maturity, his Greek origins would assume a symbolic significance for the poet, who would see them as a sign of destiny, of a special bond with the world of the ancients and, at the same time, the source of an existential status of being exiled, irregular and different, which would accompany him throughout his life.