The sole models for the Italian dramatists, at that period, were the writings of Vittorio Alfieri, whose feelings and literary taste had led him to adhere, as closely as he could, to the old classical traditions. At the age of nineteen Foscolo chose, as his first subject for a drama, the horrible story of Thyestes; but though this work was received with great applause, his literary career was, for a time, cut short by the Treaty of Campo Formio.
His political convictions seem already to have been strongly developed, for he was forced to leave Venice to escape the persecution of the new Government. Yet the creation of the Cis-Alpine Republic revived his hopes, and he hastened to Milan to take a share in the new life. There he became acquainted with the two leading poets of the day, Vincenzo Monti and Giuseppe Parini. From the former he gained several hints in style; from the latter he learnt the nobler lesson of hatred of corruption and servility. But the growing tyranny of Napoleon, the sense of the fickleness of his own countrymen, and the loathing of the rule of the Austrians, produced in Foscolo a bitter tone of cynicism and despair.
It was while in this state of mind that he fell in with Goethe's romance of Werther; and on this he modelled the strange rhapsodical story of Jacopo Ortis, in which the hero, disappointed in love and politics, takes refuge, like Werther, in suicide. But while the German romance was merely the expression of a passing feeling, which the author took pleasure in throwing into an artistic form, the Italian story was the deliberate expression of Foscolo's most permanent state of mind, and was accepted as the embodiment of the feelings of many other Lombard youths.
Foscolo, after fighting for the independence of Italy against the Austrian invasion of 1815, withdrew in disgust to England; but some of those who would gladly have welcomed him as a fellow-worker still remained in Lombardy, and tried to form a nucleus of free Italian thought.
Of these, the most remarkable was Alessandro Manzoni, best known to foreigners as the author of "I Promessi Sposi." Manzoni's influence was more widely felt in Italy at a later period; but the presence of such a man among the Lombard patriots of 1816-20 is too remarkable a fact to pass without notice. He, like so many other young nobles, had gone through a phase of eighteenth-century scepticism. But in 1808 he had been attracted by a beautiful Protestant lady, who, after her marriage to Manzoni, drifted into Roman Catholicism, and eventually led her husband to accept the same faith. Many of his old comrades denounced his conversion, and some even attributed it to evil motives. But they soon discovered that his new faith, far from weakening his Italian feeling, had strengthened, while in some sense, it softened it. The hard classicism of which Alfieri had set the fashion, and which Foscolo could not shake off, was repugnant to Manzoni, who desired to become the sacred poet of Italy, and who was recognized by Goethe as being "Christian without fanaticism, Roman Catholic without hypocrisy."
Manzoni disliked Eugène Beauharnais for wishing to derive his title to the kingdom of Italy from Alexander of Russia; but he sympathized with the attempt of Murat, and was ready to act with those Lombards who wished to rouse Italian feeling in literature and politics.
But though men like Foscolo and Manzoni had a wider and deeper influence in all parts of Italy, the person who most attracted the hopes of the Lombards and the fear and hatred of Metternich, at this period, was a man whose name is now little remembered outside his own country. This was Count Federigo Confalonieri. He, like so many of the better men of his country, had become equally disgusted with French and Austrian rulers; and, when a proposal was made by the Italian Senate in 1814 to secure from the allies an independent kingdom of Italy, to be governed by Eugène Beauharnais, Confalonieri headed a protest against the proposal. The Austrian spies seized the opportunity to stir up a riot against the Senate; and in this disturbance Prina, one of the ministers, was seized by the mob and murdered, in spite of Confalonieri's indignant protest.
The Senate fled; and the new Provisional Government of Lombardy sent Confalonieri to Paris, to plead for an independent kingdom of Lombardy. His appeal, however, was in vain; and, when the Austrians recovered their rule, Confalonieri was banished from Milan. He soon, however, returned, and devoted himself to developing in all ways the resources of his country. He had studied in London and Paris the principle of mutual instruction; and he founded schools for that purpose in Lombardy. He succeeded in getting the first steamboat built in Milan, introduced gas light, and encouraged all kinds of improvements, both artistic and industrial.
But his great work was the gathering round him, for literary and political purposes, of the great writers of Lombardy; and he founded a journal called "Il Conciliatore," to which contributions were sent by the poet Silvio Pellico, by the historians Sismondi and Botta, by Manzoni and Foscolo, and, amongst others, by a certain Lombard exile, who was afterwards to earn a short and sad celebrity in Italian history, Pellegrino Rossi. Thus, as a great noble encouraging the material growth of his country, as the centre of a literary movement, and above all as a known champion of freedom, Confalonieri riveted the attention of all who knew him.