Ugo Foscolo

Ugo Foscolo was born on 6 February 1778 at Zante (the ancient Zacinto), one of the Ionian Islands that then belonged to the Venetian Republic – of a Greek mother, Diamantina Spathis and doctor father, Andrea Foscolo, of an ancient Venetian family. He was baptized Niccolò, but from 1795 onwards he preferred to be called Ugo.
In 1792, after the sudden death of his father in 1788, he finished his early studies at the Archiepiscopal Seminary of Split in Dalmatia, and then moved for economic reasons, with his mother and three siblings to the fashionable and literary salon of Venice.