The ode was published for the first time in a collection of poems entitled Omaggio a Luigia Pallavicini (Homage to Luigia Pallavicini), in the Year VIII (September 1799 - September 1800), probably in the spring of 1800 by Genoa's Stamperia Frugoni. The booklet brought together poetry written by a group of patriots in exile in Genoa and is dedicated to Marques Luigia Ferrari Pallavicino, who had been the victim of a horse-riding accident. Foscolo had gone to Genoa after July 10 1799; the serious accident that spoiled the beauty of the lady from Genoa had occurred shortly before; so the ode may have been written at the start of his stay in Genoa, before the writer left for Nice in November of that year, or after his return to the Liguria city in March 1800. The ode subsequently appeared, with major corrections, in the editions of Poesie published in Pisa and Milan.

The ode is composed of 18 stanzas of seven-syllable lines, the second and fourth end with a proparoxytone and the last two are rhymed couplets; in interpreting the courtly sense of the ode genre, distant from the more musical solutions that were common in the 18^th century, Foscolo's debt to the lessons of Parini, whose odes had been published in 1791, is evident. The poem is split into three parts: the first six stanzas evoke the glorious moments in the life of the lady before the accident; a linking stanza follows in which the marques' decision to take up a virile activity like horse-riding is deplored; then the accident is described until the 13th stanza and, in the conclusion, the poet hopes that the lady recovers and returns to her former beauty. The ode is embellished with mythological references and language that reaches out to the sublime, interwoven with rhetorical expressions and extremely carefully-made lexical choices.

E. M. Falconnet, The Bather, 1757, Paris, The Louvre