Ugo Foscolo's Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis

Ugo Foscolo's <i>Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis</i> written between 1799 and 1815 was the first true Italian novel. Its epistolary form is in the eighteenth-century tradition of novels like <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i> and the <i>Nouvelle Héloise</i>. Jacopo's tragic love for Teresa and his subsequent suicide recall <i>The Sorrows of Young Werther</i>. In addition to being an intensely political novel this work also expresses the author's romantic conception of nature as a mirror of human emotions.