Ungaretti and the Invention of the Desert

Abstract

The desert is the land of the Profets and its void delimits a space of infinity possibilites. The presence of this space in the italian poetry is considerable. For Giuseppe Ungaretti, a man who was born in the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, the infance was a space delimited by two deserts: the sand and the sea. Both conform in the poet a vision of time and space that the young Ungaretti will discover in the Bergson’s and Nietzsche’s philosophy and as poetry in the most pure italian tradition: Petrarca and Leopardi. Our proposal is to mark the meaning of this space, mythical and concrete at the same time, in the images of your poetry and in your syntax.