Studies on Boccaccio

Foscolo composed at least three important contributions on Boccaccio during the English period: he devoted ample space to the writer in Epoche della Lingua Italiana; he wrote the introduction to the edition of The Decameron published by Pickering in 1825, which was entitled Historical Discourse on the Text of the Decameron and, finally, he wrote an article entitled Boccaccio for the “London Magazine” in 1826. He approached the study of  The Decameron driven primarily by an interest of a linguistic nature, dwelling on the problem of the Italian language as a whole. Polemical with the Della Cruscan purists, Foscolo dissociated from those who considered Boccaccio's prose the absolute model for Italian, while recognizing the historical dimension of the language that eludes standard classification criteria. Spoken Italian would enter literary Italian when the conditions of the nation allowed it; at that point the theoretical discourse on the model would be superfluous in the face of the natural historical and social evolution of the language.

While devoting a number of works to Boccaccio, the author never showed specific interest in the novella genre or in the comical, a modality that was not very congenial with his poetic personality, despite the many parody-autobiographical writings, generally published under the pseudonym Didimeo.