Giuseppe Maria Foppa was an Italian librettist, author of almost 80 librettos at the late 1700s and early 1800s. He was in activity especially in its hometown, although he wrote operas also for the theaters of Milan, Genoa, Padova, Reggio Emilia, Pistoia, Bologna and Florence. 

Author of numerous librettos of opera (especially of the farce genre), he is remembered especially by the texts put in music by Gioachino Rossini for the Venetian theaters: especially three farces: L'inganno felice, La Scala di Seta and Il Signor Bruschino and the drama Segismondo. He did diverse reductions of Carlo Goldoni’s works (among which La Bottega del Caffè, put in music in 1801 by Francesco Gardi, for whom the following year he would write the text of the farce Il Convitato di Pietra, the same topic treated by Tirso de Molina and object of Mozart´s Don Giovanni). 

In the serious genre he writes, for the carnival period of 1796 alla Scala, the libretto of Giulietta and Romeo, of William Shakespeare, put in music by Nicola Antonio Zingarelli. 

In 1840 he published in Venice a volume of Historical Memoirs, to which he added in 1842 an appendix.

Foppa wrote also the text of numerous farces (genre much in vogue in the Venetian theatres at the time), among which Gli Artigiani (for Pasquale Anfossi, 1795, presented in the Theater alla Scala di Milan), L'intrigo della lettera (for Simone Mayr, 1797), Lo spazzacamino principe and Le donne cambiante (for Marcos António Portugal, presented respectively in 1794 and 1797), Teresa and Claudio (for Giuseppe Farinelli, 1801), Un buco nella porta (for Francesco Gardi, 1804, Theater San Benedetto I gave Venezia). 

Tied firmly to the comical opera, he stopped writing librettos after the 1810s, although he would live until 1845. 

For the public theater he wrote other diverse librettos, between them Romilda ovvero La fedeltà coniugale (dramma of 1799), Il suddito fedele (dramma, 1800), the farsa-giocosa Un avvertimento ai gelosi, and L'amante anonimo (1804, per il Theater Carcano), the translation to German of the anonymous farce Il cavatore di tesori, the tragic comedy Don Gusmano and the tragic drama Matilde ossia la donna selvaggia (of 1807). 

His librettos were put in music also for Gaspare Spontini, Carlo Coccia (La verità nella bugia, Una fatale supposizione, Euristea), Stefano Pavesi and Sebastiano Nasolini.