Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on February 8, 1888, of Italian immigrants originally from Lucca. He lost his father as a young child and his mother supported the family by running a bakery on the outskirts of the city close to the Sahara. The view of the desert, with its vast emptiness, would have a great impact on Ungaretti’s complex perception of history and humanity. As he would later note, commenting on his native city:
The imagery of desolation was obsessive within me from my very first poems. It was the desert that defined it in me: out of the desert were born, in my far-off infancy and youth, the notion and feeling of the infinite, of the primal, of the fall of all things into nothingness. (qtd. in Cary 1993, 138)
The imagery of desolation was obsessive within me…
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Citation: Coda, Elena. "Giuseppe Ungaretti". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 February 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11845, accessed 12 October 2024.]