Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last letters of Jacopo Ortis): Style

The prose of Ortis is comprised of a plot that is full of literary references to the classic to great Italian and European writers of the past, from the Bible to Dante and Petrarch, up to Monti, Cesarotti, the translator of Ossian, the English graveyard poets and Alfieri. Foscolo combined material from different sources with great boldness and also used parts of his own letters (the ones to Antonietta Fagnani Arese and Isabella Roncioni, for example) and verses transcribed into prosaic form; therefore the structure of the book is highly composite with a great variety of registers and tones. Idyllic-Arcadian modalities prevail, above all, in the letters in which  Jacopo describes his meetings with Teresa, which often take place with a background of an elegiac nature, sodden with literary and, above all, Petrarchian reminiscences; but there is also an argumentative register with a Machiavelli-style dilemma modality, for example in the discourse of Parini, transcribed in the letter of December 4; there are pages dominated by the tension stemming from philosophical speculation or from an emphatic-patriotic register, or from the more descriptive elegiac modalities that characterize the lulls in the action. With no Italian tradition of Romantic prose, Foscolo drew, above all, from the lyrical poetry tradition; from here the discursive effect is increasingly broken, rich with exclamatory phrases and questions, of expressive pauses and tormented, dramatic resonances. The vocabulary is carefully chosen  and courtly, with a deeply literary imprint.