Foscolo set about writing the poem in the summer 1806, stimulated by conversations on the subject of tombs that he had had in late spring in Venice and Verona with Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi and with Ippolito Pindemonte; in the Epistolario (Epistolary) of those months there are frequent references to the subject which stirred heated discussions.
A first draft of a Epistola sui Sepolcri (Letter on Sepulchres) was composed by September 6 1806 (see Ep. II, 142-3), although the text was definitely being revised and corrected at least until the end of January 1807. The poem was brought out in Brescia by the publisher Bettoni in April 1807 with a dedication to Ippolito Pindemonte, who is remembered many times during poem and was himself the author of verses about Cimiteri (Cemeteries).
The subject was highly topical at the time because of the expected extension to Italy of the Napoleonic edict of Saint-Cloud of 1804, which forbid the erection of tombs within the walls of cities; the edict for Italy, issued on September 5 1806, was published on the “Giornale Italiano” of October 3 and is explicitly cited in verses 51-53 of the poem
Aside from the circumstantial motive, there was also an important fashion in sepulchral literature that the poem is in many ways indebted to: English graveyard poets such as Thomas Gray and Edward Young enjoyed great success in Italy too; Alessandro Verri's Notti Romane (Roman Nights, which was published in two parts in 1792 and 1804) and Alfonso Varano's Visioni Sacre e Morali (Sacred and Moral Visions - 1789) were also about funereal and sepulchral subjects. Furthermore, in Revolutionary France an intense debate opened about funeral ceremonies linked to the religion of the nation. Another source that should be remembered, because it was explicitly mentioned in the Epistolario of those years, is Jacques Delille's poem L’Imagination, which was translated into Italian in 1806 and sent by Foscolo to Isabella Teotochi Albizzi (see Ep. II, 116).
The poem Dei Sepolcri (Of the Sepulchres)
