Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last letters of Jacopo Ortis): Main Themes
In the Notizia bibliografica intorno alle Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Biographical news about Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis) that accompanied the Zurich edition, Foscolo identified love and politics as the novel's two main themes, right from its first edition.
In Jacopo's system of thought, love, along with art and beauty, is an consolatory idea, capable of distracting man from awareness of the negative nature of history and of destiny, although it remains an illusory one that does not change the tragic materialistic, mechanistic conception of existence, expressed with particular vehemence in the letter sent from Ventimiglia on February 19-20. Nevertheless, amorous passion is defined as a sacred experience that shuns the limits and compromises imposed by reason and by society; and for this reason the romantic link between love and death and the decision to commit suicide are given as unavoidable, the only way to preserve the purity of loving sentiment, in this system that is drenched in literary references to the past and heroic models.
However, the decision to commit suicide is also determined by a will to affirm absolute individual virtue that contrasts the impossibility of acting in the political-historic situation of the time via the extreme denunciation of death. Ortis takes to a heroic, highly idealized extreme the reasoning of the patriot Foscolo, who was disappointed at how the revolutionary expectations of the Republican Triennium had taken a conservative, despotic turn. In the journey around Italy, Jacopo takes on an increasingly pessimistic attitude about the possibility of intervening to save the homeland; the independence of Italy, which Foscolo had fought for, turns out to be an illusory prospect, sacrificed to personal interests and power dynamics; in the meeting with Parini in Milan, recounted in the letter of December 4, his reflections take on the universal character of a moral condemnation of the impossibility of conciliation between the literary figure and the world of power.
