Notizia attorno a Didimo Chierico (News about Didimo Chierico)

Notizia attorno a Didimo Chierico was probably written shortly before the print of Viaggio sentimentale di Yorik lungo la Francia e l’Italia (A sentimental journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick) in which Didimo figures as the translator; however, the idea to create a screen between the author and the translation dates back to 1805, when Foscolo started translate Sterne's work. Notizia is split into 15 short chapters that give sparse, fragmentary indications of the author's physical appearance and personality. Didimo is a frequently incoherent character who behaves in an eccentric, original way: he loves liberty and admires Don Quixote; he has a learned spirit, but he also has good common sense and a sense of demystification that leads him to contemplate the affairs of human existence with ironic detachment. A writer and literary man, it is revealed that he has a widespread cultural grounding that includes Dante, Shakespeare and Tasso as well as the classical writers. Didimo explicitly shows attitudes typical of Foscolo: he frequents salons and, above all, women because they have a natural disposition that is more included to passion and decency; he is hospitable and cordial, hostile to gossip and backbiting; he has contempt for wealth and any type of adulation of the exterior and chooses his company with care. His love for his homeland is a pure, absolute sentiment that rejects all compromise; his passions are not extinguished but controlled and filtered; he is more mature and aware than Jacopo Ortis, another of Foscolo's masks, detached but not immune to the passions of life.

So he appears like a «più disingannato che rinsavito» ("more undeceived than returned to reason") version of Ortis, who had not renounced his hopes while being sceptical about the chances of realizing them in the present; and while Jacopo, coherent with his nature and his choices, commits suicide, Didimo looks realistically, albeit without too many illusions, at affirming an individual virtue that seeks to impose itself not by action ("considered impossible at that time"), but with reason and balance.

Didimo also figures as the author in Ipercalisse during the years of exile.