Giuseppe Ungaretti (born Feb. 10, 1888, Alexandria—died June 1, 1970, Milan) was born of Italian parents in the Egyptian seaport of Alexandria. Ungaretti studied in Paris in 1912, where he met Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. In Paris he fell under the influence of the French Symbolist poets, especially Stéphane Mallarmé.

Ungaretti fought in the trenches of World War I, and in his first book of poems, L'Allegria (1914–19; "Joie de Vivre"), he confronted that harrowing experience in verse that is both sparce and isolated. His tone and style changed in Sentimento del tempo (1933; "Sentiment of Time") where the verse is more expansive and rich, although strange and difficult.

Ungaretti is credited as the founder the influental Hermetic movement in modern Italian poetry.

From 1936 to 1942 Ungaretti taught Italian literature at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. The war and the loss of his son are expressed in his 1947 work Il dolore ( "Grief "). In 1942 Ungaretti returned to Italy and taught contemporary Italian literature at the University of Rome until his retirement in 1957. Important volumes published during this time are La terra promessa (1950; "The Promised Land") and Un grido e paesaggi (1952). Among his later volumes were Il taccuino del vecchio (1960; "An Old Man's Notebook") and Morte delle stagioni (1967; "Death of the Seasons").

In 1964, Ungaretti gave a series of lectures at Columbia University in New York City, and, in 1970, he was invited by the University of Oklahoma to receive its Books Abroad Prize. It was during this last trip that Ungaretti fell ill with bronchopneumonia. He returned to Milan wher he died.

Ungaretti translated into Racine's Phèdre, a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets, and works of Luis de Góngora y Argote, Stéphane Mallarmé, and William Blake.