Ugo Foscolo was a truly international literary figure, drawing inspiration from many lands. He translated Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, produced a prose masterpiece in his Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis and wrote a poetic masterpiece, On Sepulchres (1807), which celebrates the great figures of Italy's past. Of the height of poetic inspiration in this last work, Giosue Carducci would later say that there is a "fusing together in a single sublime choral harmony the accents of sermon and hymn, elegy and satire, tragedy and epic."
Italian historian and archaeologist Valerio Massimo Manfredi is a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Milan. He was named Man of the Year 1999 by the American Biographical Institute for this bestselling trilogy. Manfredi's books have been published in France, Germany, Greece, Russia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.