Greece

In Foscolo's work the theme of Greece combines his autobiographic perspective with the mythical-literary dimension that it made it highly popular in the age of Neoclassicism, as part of a critical revisitation and an awareness of the relationship with the classics, on the basis of the assertion that art should aspire to the perfection and balance of the ancients.

Foscolo felt particularly sympathetic and close to Greece for various reasons: his birth at Zante, the Greek origins of his maternal family; the solidarity of a patriot for the political fate of a country fighting for independence (the political problem of Greece can be seen in his writings from the period of exile in England) and, finally, the literary references to classical culture and Greece as the homeland of Homer. All of these themes are expressed with particular intensity, in a sought-after synthesis, in the sonnet Né più mai toccherò le sacre sponde, which is also known under the title A Zacinto (To Zante), where his birth on Zante suggests an identification between the poet and Ulysses, who, like the poet, was also an exile and a man without a homeland, and with this comes an indirect identification with Homer, the poet of Ulysses. In this way the poet's affairs in exile and his disillusionment at historical circumstances are reassessed with a mythical interpretation via a projection into a heroic Greek past. Greece is also the mythical place of the origins of human civilization in Le Grazie.

In the years of the English exile, Foscolo planned for a period, just after arriving in England, to move to Greece to regain a personal and mythical-literary memory and in this way become close again to a twice-lost homeland.