Un dì s’io non andrò sempre fuggendo (One day, if I am not to keep on fleeing)

Composed between the spring and summer of 1803 and published in Milan in the Agnello Nobile edition of the summer of the same year, this sonnet is dedicated to his brother Giovanni, who died in Venice aged 20 on December 8 1801, almost certainly of suicide. The work has a direct predecessor in Catullus's poem CI, which had been translated by Parini. It shares similar autobiographical and existential themes with the sonnets of the same period Forse perché della fatal quiete and Né più mai toccherò le sacre sponde.

There are a number of references to Catullus, starting from the first verses that evoke the poets' pilgrimages and arrival at the tomb of his relatives as a moment of meditation that contrasts the continual existential wandering; however, unlike the poem of the Latin poet, which concludes with an intimate, affectionate gesture of homage to the brother's tomb, Foscolo's composition takes the personal experience to a symbolic level that, as always in the poet's work, is tightly interwoven with literary themes such as the sepulchre, the homeland, exile, death and the end of illusions.

In this way the funereal lament for the brother becomes the expression of the unease of an exile who associates this state of exile to death, revising a metaphor of Biblical origins that had been well developed in the literary tradition; death and exile defer to an lack of something, a condition of existential suffering that only the “quiete” (quiet) of death can resolve. The recollection of his mother, linked to that of his brother, is the most symbolic image of an affective universe that is presented as unreachable yet highly vivid in the poet's mind; and in the conclusion the poet claims the right to an illusion of peace that comes about in the tomb, at least.