Viaggio sentimentale di Yorik lungo la Francia e l’Italia

Foscolo started to translate Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey in 1804 while he was stationed in France as an officer in the Italian Division. After he returned to Milan in 1806 he resumed work on the translation, which was only finished in Florence in the winter of 1812 and published in Pisa by the publishers Molini in July 1813 with the title of Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l’Italia. Traduzione di Didimo Chierico (A sentimental journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick. Translation by Didimo Chierico ) together with Notizia attorno a Didimo Chierico. Before the work was published, Foscolo dissatisfied with a result he judged too close to the English language, had extensively revised the translation and went back to work on it even after its publication. Aware of the lack of an Italian prose style fitting for the novel genre, the writer experimented, via constant expressive research, with all the different possibilities to render in Italian the most important stylistic features of the English text: the animated sentence structure, the wordplay, the irony, the mock sententiousness. The translator's aim was to move as far away as possible from the English or French prose (in fact he also used French translations) and reproduce in Italian the different registers of Sterne's eclectic prose, using the possibilities offered by the Italian language with calques of pure old Tuscan expressions taken from the classics. 

Foscolo's interest in Sterne accompanied him from the years of early development of his youth and he read the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy before Ortis; the English novelist also appears to be a source for Sesto tomo dell’Io, with its eclectic, fragmented writing composed on Stern's model.