23 Facts About Giuseppe Ungaretti

Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, Egypt into a family from the Tuscan city of Lucca.

Giuseppe Ungaretti's father worked on digging the Suez Canal, where he suffered a fatal accident in 1890.

Giuseppe Ungaretti became familiar with works of the Classicists Giacomo Leopardi and Giosue Carducci, as well as with the writings of maverick author Giovanni Pascoli.

In 1912, the 24-year-old Giuseppe Ungaretti moved to Paris, France.

Giuseppe Ungaretti attended lectures at the College de France and the University of Paris, and had among his teachers was philosopher Henri Bergson, whom he reportedly admired.

Giuseppe Ungaretti was in contact with the Italian expatriates, including leading representatives of Futurism such as Carlo Carra, Umberto Boccioni, Aldo Palazzeschi, Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici, as well as with the independent visual artist Amedeo Modigliani.

The conflict made Giuseppe Ungaretti discover his talent as a poet, and, in 1917, he published the volume of free verse Il porto sepolto, largely written on the Kras front.

Giuseppe Ungaretti published a volume of French-language poetry, titled La guerre.

Giuseppe Ungaretti was present in the Paris-based Dadaist circle led by Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, being, alongside Alberto Savinio, Julius Evola, Gino Cantarelli, Aldo Fiozzi and Enrico Prampolini, one of the figures who established a transition from Italian Futurism to Dada.

Giuseppe Ungaretti was affiliated with the literary circle formed around the journal La Ronda.

The year after his marriage, Giuseppe Ungaretti returned to Italy, settling in Rome as a Foreign Ministry employee.

Giuseppe Ungaretti joined in the National Fascist Party, signing the pro-fascist Manifesto of the Italian Writers in 1925.

Mussolini, who did not give a favorable answer to Giuseppe Ungaretti's appeal, prefaced the 1923 edition of Il porto sepolto, thus politicizing its message.

In 1925, Giuseppe Ungaretti experienced a religious crisis, which, three years later, made him return to the Roman Catholic Church.

The new trend, inspired by both Symbolism and Futurism, had its origins in both Il porto sepolto, where Giuseppe Ungaretti had eliminated structure, syntax and punctuation, and the earlier contributions of Arturo Onofri.

In 1942, three years after the start of World War II, Giuseppe Ungaretti returned to Axis-allied Italy, where he was received with honors by the officials.

Giuseppe Ungaretti continued to write poetry, and published a series of essays.

At Rome, Giuseppe Ungaretti mentored the poet Elio Filippo Accrocca, whose work was greatly influenced by Giuseppe Ungaretti's.

At the close of the war, following Mussolini's downfall, Giuseppe Ungaretti was expelled from the faculty owing to his fascist connections, but reinstated when his colleagues voted in favor of his return.

Giuseppe Ungaretti visited Japan, the Soviet Union, Israel and the United States.

L'Allegria, previously called L'Allegria di Naufragi, is a decisive moment of the recent history of Italian literature: Giuseppe Ungaretti revises with novel ideas the poetic style of the poetes maudits, connecting it with his experience of death and pain as a soldier at war.

Giuseppe Ungaretti's collected works were published as Vita di un uomo at the time of his death.

Two of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poems were made into song by American composer Harry Partch ; and eleven poems were set by the French-Romanian composer Horatiu Radulescu in his cycle End of Kronos.