Versi dell’adolescenza (Verses of the youth)

Foscolo's first collection of verse was offered as a gift in manuscript form to his friend and distant relative Costantino Naranzi in 1794 and published posthumously at Lugano with the title Poesie inedite di Niccolò Ugo Foscolo tratte da un manoscritto originale (Unpublished poems by Niccolò Ugo Foscolo from an original manuscript); in the Edizione Nazionale (Vol. II), the collection is entitled Versi dell’adolescenza (Verses of Adolescence). In the dedication to Naranzi, drafted in an emotional, weepy style, Foscolo wrote that love “has ruled that I offer these verses to a sensitive friend” (“ha dettato que’ versi ch’offro al sensibile amico”) and, indeed, the subject of the 41 compositions in the manuscript is prevalently love. The verses are split into three sections: Inni e Elegie (Hymns and Elogies); Anacreontiche e Canzonette (Anacreontics and Canzonets); Odi (Odes). Translations of Anacreon, Sappho, Horace, Gessner, Weilles Alemanno and Pontano followed.

Although the collection reveals a certain expressive command in Foscolo, it is a scholastic exercise that echoes the casual 18th-century lyrical patterns: this can be seen, for example, in the canzonet La Lontananza (The Distance), in which the nymph Cloe moves on a usual background of a stylized Arcadian nature. But there is no lack of more original components that introduce recurring themes in the young Foscolo's lyric poetry, as in the poem Il Ritratto (The Portrait), in the Inni e Elegie section, in which he describes himself showing a tendency for physical and spiritual self-representation that would find plenty of space in the output of his more mature years.

Even the dedication to Naranzi is an example of the emotional, emphatic prose that foretells Ortis and his more mature writing, above all for the focus on themes like distance, memory and friendship.