Antonietta Fagnani Arese was born in Milan in 1778, the last child of Count Giacomo Fagnani and Costanza Brusati of the Marquis of Settala; in 1798 at the age of 20 she married Marquis Marco Arese Lucini, a magistrate who worked with the Napoleonic government. The couple had five children, only three of whom survived. Antonietta spoke proper French, English and German and became a protagonist of the brilliant Milanese society of the Consolate and the Empire. Her relationship with Foscolo probably started in July 1801 and is known about today primarily via the letters of the poet, who dedicated to her the ode All'amica risanata. The correspondence with Antonietta amounts to around 200 of the poet's letters, sometimes more than one of which were written in the same day and form a sort of daily diary of the love between the two, in which various pieces of news, promises of meetings and passionate declarations alternate. The confines between life and literature seems to disappear in Ugo's epistolary language: many expressions from the letters are used in Ortis, which Foscolo was preparing for print at the time (this is seen, for example, in the incipit of letter LXIII: «Torno con te, mia Antonietta», (I return to you, my Antonietta), which resembles the last letter between Jacopo a Teresa: «Torno a te, mia Teresa» (I return to you, my Teresa)); furthermore, Foscolo himself often signs as “Ortis”, turning into the character from the novel: “Chiamami romanzo, ed hai forse ragione” ("Call me novel, and perhaps you are right", Letter VIII, Ep. I, 224-26). So his love for Antonietta is closely linked to the period of revising the novel; on the other hand, Antonietta translated The sorrows of young Werther into Italian for her lover; Foscolo told Goethe this in the letter of January 16 1802 (Ep. I, 129-132). By March 1803 the love affair was definitively over, with a request for the return of the letters and portraits. Antonietta died in Genoa in 1847.

Portrait taken from the website of the Fagnani Arese family, www.famigliafagnani.com