Premio Roma 2018
Shortlisted for Premio Viareggio Rèpaci 2018

Furiously Mr Foscolo is a passionate and adventurous literary journey in the turbulent life of Ugo Foscolo. A poet, a writer and a patriot, active from the late years of the Eighteenth Century to the second decade of the Nineteenth, his life was as controversial and mysterious as his work is now acclaimed, recognised as one of the most brilliant examples of neoclassicism and pre-romanticism in Italian literature.
Luigi Guarnieri, with a fiercely ironic pen, vividly recreates the history of the man behind his art, starting from his latest difficult years in England, where the poet arrived in 1816 after his voluntary exile in Switzerland. Through his eyes, we enter the London literary society of the 1800s, also discovering its dark side, the pettiness, the triviality and the ruthless mechanisms that ruled it. Among the few splendours and many miseries of life in London, the reckless expenses and the time in prison, the strenuous defence of his dignity as a writer and the battles with the publishers, Foscolo’s life flows furiously. The great love for Quirina and the faded marriage with Caroline, the writing of the Ortis and of the Sepolcri, Byron and Mazzini, the appearance of his daughter Floriana and the insidious illness that will lead him to death: the incandescent portrait of a tormented man, inhabited by great passions and destined to generate just as many, fiercely adverse to the world and therefore repaid by the world with the same coin.
A novel about the unbridled life of one of the most beloved and least known authors of Italian literature, restless and damned like a hero of our times.