Exile

The theme of exile is central to Ortis, a novel that was destined to become an important source of political and memorialist literature for the Italian Risorgimento unification movement, in part because of the theme of distance from the homeland. The autobiographical inspiration (Jacopo and Ugo go through the same experience of leaving Venice following the Treaty of Campoformio and both go to the border between France and Italy, although Jacopo does not cross it) does not exhaust the extent of the theme in the novel, in which exile has a metaphorical value and reflects an existential condition of unease and dissatisfaction that pushes the protagonist to see (in politics, love, and human and family relations) an absolute dimension which is only realized with suicide. In his literary texts Foscolo projects his personal condition of rootlessness, of only being an imaginary citizen of many homelands (Greece, Venice, Italy), of experiencing circumstances that deny him a true belonging; but the theme of distance and the impossibility of return in some of the writer's works become a factor that is not contingent, i.e. linked to biographical circumstances, it is an existential condition which the literary meanings of the theme also influence. In the sonnet Un dì s’io non andrò sempre fuggendo, the subject of exile is linked to the subjects of the homeland and of burial, joined by the theme of the impossible arrival, of rootlessness which, liberating the poet from any temptation for compromise and mediation, make him a chosen one, a pure one; in literary traditions (from Ovid and Cicero to Dante), the exile is also the person who can talk without limits and therefore say the truth because of his condition of rootlessness: and this demand for purity, supported by the writer's condition of rootlessness, combined perfectly with Foscolo'a aim to present himself as the poet-bard of the contemporary world.