Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1839–1869) was one of the most original writers of the Italian “Scapigliatura”. A former army officer, novelist, journalist, and author of fantastic tales, he explored illness, obsession, psychological instability, anti-militarism, and the darker dimensions of modern life. His best-known works include Una nobile follia, the “Racconti fantastici”, and “Fosca”, the novel that secured his place among the most distinctive voices of nineteenth-century Italian literature.
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Italian Literature
Fosca
“Fosca” is one of the most disturbing and psychologically modern novels of nineteenth-century Italian literature. Giorgio, a young army officer, finds himself trapped between two radically different forms of love: the serene beauty of Clara and the obsessive, consuming passion of Fosca, a gravely ill woman whose emotional intensity overwhelms every boundary of reason, pity, and self-preservation. Published in 1869 and closely associated with the Italian “Scapigliatura”, Tarchetti’s masterpiece explores love as illness, desire as compulsion, and compassion as a force capable of becoming destructive. Gothic, intimate, and unsettling, Fosca anticipates the psychological fiction of the twentieth century in its portrait of divided consciousness, bodily revulsion, guilt, obsession, and emotional dependency. This new English edition brings Tarchetti’s haunting novel to contemporary readers in a translation that preserves the intensity, strangeness, and dark elegance of the original.
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