Giuseppe Ungaretti died on the night of June 2, 1970, after spending an intense life between Alexandria, France, the Karst front line, Brazil and Italy. He was first Catholic, then atheist and then Catholic again while, politically, he sympathised with and later moved away from Fascism. Ungaretti’s literary education was based on French literature. He read the poets of Decadentism and Symbolism, including Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire and then Apollinaire, and later came into contact with the Italian Futurists and Dadaists. Ungaretti should be credited with formally and profoundly renewing the traditional Italian verse. For this ability, he was considered by the poets of Hermeticism as one of their forerunners, and by many poets of the second half of the 20th century he was seen, together with Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale, as a reference point.

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