L'allegria

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was an Italian poet born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Tuscan parents, who moved to Paris in 1912 and debuted as a poet during World War I service in the Italian trenches. A leading figure in the Hermeticism movement and 20th-century Italian literature, he published seminal works like Il porto sepolto and L'allegria, worked as a journalist, taught in Brazil and Rome, and received the inaugural 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.