[3][4][5][6][7][8] In 1788, upon the death of his father, who worked as a physician in Spalato (present-day Split, Croatia), the family moved to Venice, and Foscolo completed the studies he began at the Dalmatian grammar school at the University of Padua.

[9] Amongst his Paduan teachers was the Abbé Melchiore Cesarotti, whose version of Ossian was very popular in Italy, and who influenced Foscolo's literary tastes; he knew both modern and Ancient Greek.

[9] Foscolo, who, for unknown reasons, had changed his Christian name Niccolò to that of Ugo, began to take an active part in the stormy political discussions which the fall of the Republic of Venice had triggered.

The state of mind produced by that shock is reflected in his novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798), which was described by the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica as a more politicized version of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther: "for Foscolo's hero embodies the mental sufferings and suicide of an undeceived Italian patriot just as Goethe's hero places before us the too-delicate sensitiveness, embittering and at last cutting short the life of a private German scholar.

Ove piú il Sole per me alla terra non-fecondi questa bella d'erbe famiglia e d'animali, e quando vaghe di lusinghe innanzi a me non-danzeran l'ore future, né da te, dolce amico, udrò piú il verso e la mesta armonia che lo governa, né piú nel cor mi parlerà lo spirto delle vergini Muse e dell'amore, unico spirto a mia vita raminga, qual fia ristoro a' dí perduti un sasso che distingua le mie dalle infinite ossa che in terra e in mar semina morte?

— When for me the sun no more Shall shine on earth, to bless with genial beams This beauteous race of beings animate — When bright with flattering hues the coming hours No longer dance before me — and I hear No more, regarded friend, thy dulcet verse, Nor the sad gentle harmony it breathes — When mute within my breast the inspiring voice Of youthful poesy, and love, sole light To this my wandering life — what guerdon then For vanished years will be the marble reared To mark my dust amid the countless throng Wherewith the Spoiler strews the land and sea?

[9] During the eleven years spent by Foscolo in London, until his death there, he enjoyed all the social distinction which the most brilliant circles of the English capital could confer on foreigners of political and literary renown, and experienced all the misery which follows on from a disregard of the first conditions of domestic economy.

[9] According to the History of the County of Middlesex, the scientist and businessman William Allen hired Foscolo to teach Italian at the Quaker school he co-founded, the Newington Academy for Girls.

He died at Turnham Green on 10 September 1827, and was buried at St Nicholas Church, Chiswick, where his restored tomb remains to this day; it refers to him as the "wearied citizen poet", and incorrectly states his age as 50.

Forty-four years after his death, on 7 June 1871, his remains were exhumed at the request of the King of Italy and taken to Florence, where with all the pride, pomp and circumstance of a great national mourning, found their final resting-place beside the monuments of Niccolò Machiavelli and Vittorio Alfieri, of Michelangelo and Galileo, in the church of Santa Croce,[9][21] the pantheon of Italian glory he had celebrated in Dei Sepolcri.