Ricciarda
Foscolo composed Ricciarda during his stay in Florence between 1812 and June1813. It was staged for the first time by Salvatore Fabbrichesi's company at Bologna's Teatro del Corso on September 17 1813 in the presence of the author, who was not satisfied by the representation and, above all, by the actors' interpretations. The text was only printed years later in London in 1820 by the publisher John Murray, when it enjoyed modest success.
After three tragedies on mythological subjects, Foscolo chose a Medieval subject for his last tragedy and an historic setting probably prompted by his interest in Machiavelli and the Tuscan historians of the 16th century, whose works he read at the start of his stay in Florence.
The plot develops in the course of one day in a single place, in respect of the classic unities, and it is about the love story between Ricciarda and Guido, the respective children of Guelfo, the tyrant of Salerno, and Averardo, Guelfo's half-brother who was defrauded out of the kingdom and sent into exile. Averardo lays siege to Salerno, but he wants to save his son Guido, who had hidden in the cellars of Guelfo's palace amid the family sepulchres to stay near to Ricciarda. The action proceeds at a brisk pace with plots twists, mishaps and identifications, with the two young people divided between love and family affection, and it ends with Ricciarda being killed by her father, who takes his own life immediately after. Ricciarda is a tragedy of great contrasts that revives some of the common themes of Foscolo's writing: the link between love and death, relations between father and children and the cult of the sepulchres. There is no shortage of political content, with the moral condemnation of Guelfo, the tyrant of Salerno and the demand for Italian liberty, albeit veiled by the transposition to a different historical period.
