Early life Ungaretti was born in
Alexandria,
Egypt into a family from the Tuscan city of
Lucca. Ungaretti's father worked on digging the
Suez Canal, where he suffered a fatal accident in 1890. He abandoned Christianity and became an atheist. It was not until 1928 that he returned to the Catholic faith. In 1912, the 24-year-old Giuseppe Ungaretti moved to Paris, France. On his way there, he stopped in Rome,
Florence and
Milan, meeting face to face with Prezzolini. Apollinaire's work came to be a noted influence on his own. as well as with the independent visual artist
Amedeo Modigliani.
World War I and debut Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Ungaretti, like his Futurist friends, supported an
irredentist position, and called for his country's intervention on the side of the
Entente Powers. Enrolled in the infantry a year later, he saw action on the
Northern Italian theater, serving in the
trenches. In contrast to his early enthusiasm, he became appalled by the realities of war. Although depicting the hardships of war life, his celebrated ''L'Allegria'' was not unenthusiastic about its purpose (even if in the poem "Fratelli", and in others, he describes the absurdity of the war and the brotherhood between all the men); this made Ungaretti's stance contrast with that of
Lost Generation writers, who questioned their countries' intents, and similar to that of Italian intellectuals such as Soffici,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
Piero Jahier and
Curzio Malaparte. By the time the
1918 armistice was signed, Ungaretti was again in Paris, He published a volume of French-language poetry, titled
La guerre ("The War", 1919). In 1920, Giuseppe Ungaretti married the Frenchwoman Jeanne Dupoix, with whom he had a daughter, Ninon (born 1925), and a son, Antonietto (born 1930). In May 1921, he was present at the Dadaist mock trial of
reactionary author
Maurice Barrès, during which the Dadaist movement began to separate itself into two competing parts, headed respectively by Tzara and
André Breton. He was also affiliated with the literary circle formed around the journal
La Ronda. He argued: "The first task of the Academy will be to reestablish a certain connection between men of letters, between writers, teachers, publicists. This people hungers for poetry. If it had not been for the miracle of
Blackshirts, we would never have leaped this far." In 1925, 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 Ungaretti had eliminated structure,
syntax and punctuation, and the earlier contributions of
Arturo Onofri. At the close of the war, following Mussolini's downfall, Ungaretti was expelled from the faculty owing to his fascist connections, but reinstated when his colleagues voted in favor of his return. Affected by his wife's 1958 death, Giuseppe Ungaretti sought comfort in traveling throughout Italy and abroad. He visited Japan, the
Soviet Union, Israel and the United States. In 1964, he gave a series of lectures at
Columbia University in New York City, and, in 1970, was invited by the
University of Oklahoma to receive its
Books Abroad Prize. During this last trip, Ungaretti fell ill with
bronchopneumonia, and, although he received treatment in New York City, died while under medical supervision in Milan. He was buried in
Campo Verano (Rome). ==Poetry==