Collection: Giuseppe Ungaretti

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970) was born in Alexandria to Italian settlers – his father was a laborer working on the Suez Canal and his mother ran a bakery. In 1912, Ungaretti left Egypt for Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where he befriended Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Valéry, Picasso, Braque, and Léger. Ungaretti wrote his first book of poetry while serving in the Italian Army in World War I. Much later, after the death of his nine-year-old son, Ungaretti published a collection of poems, Il dolore, which expressed both tragic personal loss and horror at the atrocities of Nazi Germany. His other poetry collections include Morte delle stagioni (Death of the Seasons), La terra promessa (The Promised Land), and Sentimento del tempo (The Feeling of Time). As a correspondent for Gazzetta del Popolo, Ungaretti wrote a series of semi-autobiographical essays revisiting his birthplace in Egypt. Ungaretti also translated into Italian a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets, poetry by William Blake, and Racine's Phèdre, among other works. T. S. Eliot considered Ungaretti “one of the very few authentic poets of my generation” and Ingeborg Bachmann claimed he revolutionized Italian poetry. He died in Milan in 1970.