Like Leaves in Autumn by Carlo Pirozzi et al sampler

carnage was terrible, with more than 300,000 Italians and Austro-
Hungarian soldiers losing their lives, but Ungaretti came through the
conflict unscathed.
After the war, Ungaretti settled in Rome with his family, working in
the Press Office at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as a
correspondent for Il Popolo d’Italia, an important political daily paper
founded by Benito Mussolini. His position at the Ministry allowed him
to travel continually and he was able to lecture at various European
universities as well as further afield. In 1936 he moved to Brazil, where
he took up a teaching post at São Paulo University. During his stay in
South America, which lasted until 1942, he managed to forge links
with some of the leading Brazilian poets, including a young Vinicius
de Moraes, for whom he translated several poems. Ungaretti then
returned to Rome, where at La Sapienza University, he was given the
Chair of Italian Literature. During the Roman years he continued
travelling in Europe, Africa, North and South America and Asia. He
came home from his last trip, absolutely exhausted. Immediately after,
on the night of 1 June 1970, he passed away at the age of 82.
Among his many works, of particular note are his translations of
Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean Racine and Saint-John Perse, 40 sonnets by
Shakespeare and other sonnets by Luis de Góngora, a large number of
William Blake’s Visions, and some excellent versions of Ezra Pound,
Sergei Esenin and Brazilian poets, such as José Oswald de Souza
Andrade, Mário de Andrade and Vinicius de Moraes. Out of his
enormous corpus of literary criticism, the university lectures that he
gave during his stay in Brazil are especially memorable, principally
those centred on the founders of Italian and European literature, Dante
and Petrarch. No less important are his lectures on the centrality and
indisputable merit of Leopardi. Ungaretti, moreover, continued to
explore Leopardi’s work in depth during his period at La Sapienza
University (See Vita d’un uomo. Viaggi e lezioni, a cura di Paola
Montefoschi, Milano, Mondadori, 2000).
Ungaretti’s most important collections include L’Allegria (The Joy,
1919), A Sense of Time (Il Sentimento del Tempo, 1933), Il Dolore
(Affliction, 1947), La Terra Promessa (The Promised Land, 1950) and
Il Taccuino del Vecchio (The Old Man’s Notebook, 1960). These are
the fundamental components of his complete works collected under
18 like leaves in autumn