After days and days of torrential rain, this morning we finally woke up to a beautiful sunny sky! So, to make the most of it, we decided to go out for a walk. The autumn trees stood out against the clear blue sky, and the mountain streams roared, loaded with rain water. As we were going past the local cemetery I noticed that the memorial cross was decorated with a wreath of flowers and the colours of the Italian flag (green, white and red). This reminded me that yesterday was the 4th of November, the end of the First World war for Italy, which used to be a holiday when we were kids. The road ahead was covered in brown autumnal leaves freshly fallen from the trees, and a few lines of poetry came back to me:

This short poem was written by Giuseppe Ungaretti in July 1918. Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in 1888 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his parents, originally from Lucca (Italy) had gone to work on the excavation of the Suez Canal. In 1912 Ungaretti left Egypt and went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. Then in 1915 he enlisted as a volunteer in the Great War, and was sent to fight as a private in the Carso area, in the Alps, which lies today on the border with Slovenia. It was during this time, between 1915-1918, that Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote some of his most famous poems. His work is characterised by the lack of any sort of embellishment or punctuation, using instead very short lines and empty spaces. This style is called ermetismo (hermetic).

Here is another famous poem, written in 1917, which describes the devastating effects of the war both on the village of San Martino del Carso and on the poet himself:

You can read some more by Giuseppe Ungaretti by clicking on the following link: Natale