Le Grazie: An Incomplete Work
The story of the composition of Le Grazie is complex and spread out over many years without ever reaching a final form. Reconstruction of the various phases of its writing reveal the poem had political and civil aims, conceived in a tumultuous and uncertain moment in history and constantly revised on the basis of the calls of the situation of the time.
A first reference to four fragments of an “antico inno alle Grazie” (old hymn to the Graces) is contained in the comment on the translation of Chioma di Berenice of 1803; in a letter to Monti (Ep. II, pp. 544-45) of December 1808 Foscolo spoke for the first time of a hymn dedicated to the Le Grazie (The Graces) within a series of Inni Italiani (Italian Hymns): various fragments turn out to have been composed in the late summer of 1812 and put into a single poem the following spring while the author was in Florence. The poem, which the author continued to add episodes to in the months spent at the Villa di Bellosguardo, had already assumed a tripartite form in June 1813; when he returned to Milan, Foscolo continued to work on the text up until his departure for exile, repeatedly telling various interlocutors that the verses were about to be handed over for print.
The whole work of rewriting, correcting and expanding the poem is documented in various manuscripts from England and conserved in the Biblioteca Labronica (Labronica Library) of Livorno and Milan's Archivio di Stato (State Archive); the Seconda Redazione dell’Inno (Second Draft of the Hymn), a clean copy of the whole poem, the so-called Quadernone (Big Notebook), where it is a tripartite poem, and the verses of the Rito (Rite) sent to Florence from Milan in 1813 for approval from the censor, stand out among these.
The only part printed, upon the will of author, regarding the veil of the Graces and accompanied by Dissertation on an Ancient Hymn to the Graces by Ugo Foscolo, is contained in the book Outline Engravings and Description of the Woburn Abbey Marbles devoted to the Duke of Bedford's sculptures, which include a group of the Graces by Canova. The critical edition of the text, edited by Mario Scotti, was prepared in 1985 for the first volume of the Edizione Nazionale.
