Silvio Pellico

Silvio Pellico (Saluzzo, June 25 1798-Turin, January 31 1854) met Foscolo in Milan, when he was very young via his brother Luigi around 1810 and went on to become one of his most faithful friends and collaborators. At the time of his departure for exile in 1815, Foscolo entrusted a chest containing his manuscripts and personal documents to the young Piedmontese. The correspondence between the two was highly intense until Pellico's arrest in 1820 and his detention at the fortress of Spielberg, where he wrote his most famous book Le mie Prigioni (My Prisons). Pellico tried in vain to obtain Foscolo's collaboration for “Conciliatore”, the magazine of the Milanese Romantic movement of which the young Piedmonter was one of the most faithful promoters. Hostile to the Romantic movement for its excess of theory and criticism of the ancient, Foscolo expressed his perplexities about the magazine in an extremely long letter to Pellico (East-Moulsey, September 30 1818, Ep. I, 383-395); above all, he expressed scepticism about its chances of defeating the hostility and corruption of the Milanese environment and of assuring the publication a sufficient degree of political autonomy. His insistence on the existence of a form of connivance between literature and political power and the dynamics derived from the Milanese intellectual society, even after the fall of Napoleon, recall the condemnation that was to come shortly after in the Lettera apologetica. After Foscolo's death Pellico devoted a poem in octaves to him, Ugo Foscolo, in which he praised his friend, stressing his moral integrity and virtue and ending the encomium in lament about Foscolo's lack of faith and a prayer that his soul be saved by God anyway.