Ugo Foscolo's Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, written between 1799 and 1815, was the first true Italian novel. Its epistolary form is in the eighteenth-century tradition of novels like Clarissa Harlowe and the Nouvelle Heloise. Jacopo's tragic love for Teresa and his subsequent suicide recall The Sorrows of Young Werther. 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.
