Isabella Roncioni

Foscolo frequented the 18-year-old Isabella Roncioni in Florence between the end of 1800 and the start of 1801; the girl had been promised in marriage to Marquis Pier Antonio Bartolommei and the wedding took place in August 1801. It was an impossible love affair that lasted a very short period of time and contributed to inspiring Foscolo's poetry in this period and influenced the revision of Ortis, which the writer was preparing for the Milan edition. Isabella certainly inspired some love sonnets, written in the spring of 1801 and published in the Pisa editions: Perché taccia il rumor di mia catena (Why silence the noise of my chain), E tu ne’ carmi avrai perenne vita (And you in poems will have eternal life), in which the girl is celebrated as a divine creature.

In the months in which he was in love, Foscolo wrote only one letter to Isabella, which it has not been possible to date with certainty (it possibly dates back to March 1801); it is a letter of goodbye, full of emotional, poignant modalities that inspired the letter dated “ore 9” (hour nine), sent by Jacopo to Teresa before embarking on the journey that would take him first to Rovigo and then Florence and Milan; extracts from letters to Antonietta Fagnani Arese also flow into the same letter, as shown by Giuseppe Nicoletti (Foscolo, Salerno Editrice, Rome 2007). Eleonora Nencini, one of the priestesses of Le Grazie, is also involved in the brief correspondence between Isabella and Ugo, as a friend of both and an intermediary between them.

Foscolo saw Isabella Roncioni, by this time married to Bartolommei, again in Florence in 1813 in the salon of Luisa d’Albany and he wrote her a letter from London on September 10 1819.