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Giuseppe Ungaretti (Alexandria of Egypt 1888-Milan 1970) experienced the Great War as a front line soldier in the Karst area, after being enrolled in the Italian Army in 1915. His first poem written at war is dated 22nd December 1915. He spent the following year between the first line in San Martino and on Mount San Michele and the rear guard in Santa Maria la Longa, writing all the verses later published in a collection named  “Il porto sepolto". He returned to visit this territory in 1966 to attend a conference about poetry in Gorizia, and he left these thoughts: “I returned to some places in the Karst yesterday. That stony ground – back then reddened by dry blood and smeared with slobbery mud, and treacherous to whom crossed it at a loss in the night during gunfire – is now coated in thick greenery. Incredibly enough, the Karst today is almost a pleasant place. I thought: you see, the Karst is no more hell, but as green as hope. You see – I thought – it rallies men who want to spread poetry, that is faith and love”.

Written like a diary, GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI’s war poems report the place and day he composed them, under the fury of shells or during the long idle spells of life in the trenches. One of his best known poem was written in the so-called “Valloncello dell’albero isolato”, few steps away from the top of Mount San Michele, now a sacred area for Italy. An open-air museum itinerary will lead you through vestiges of trenches and was memories, cannon embrasures, military strongholds and stone slabs recalling the sacrifice of several soldiers. Up here, GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI was inspired to compose his most famous poem “Morning”, which in fact he wrote during a break in the rear guard of Santa Maria la Longa. The village of San Martino del Carso is a symbol of the ravages of the war as it lay in the midst of the fighting between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops from 1915 to 1917. Evacuated, pillaged and bombed, the village was chanted by the poet in few intense verses you’ll find written on a stone in the village.  In the greenery around a villa belonging to the winemaking farm Castelvecchio, Parco Ungaretti is a literary park dedicated to the poet, owned by the Association “Amici di Castelnuovo” from Sagrado. Visitors are invited to discover the relationship between the landscape of the Karst, the Great War and the poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, with a number of installations inspired to the famous verses the poet wrote during his experience of life in the trenches on the hills above Sagrado.