Mirage and Camouflage

This study explores the tensions and contradictions in the themes and style of L'Allegria. It establishes links between Ungaretti and the French Symbolist poets, and reexamines the collection's affinity with the work of De Chirico, Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism. Offering ground-breaking views, particularly on the war poems, it demonstrates how Ungaretti used the obscure nature of Hermetic language to express his proto-Fascist and Nietzschean sympathies, thus destroying the myth of Ungaretti as a 'man of peace' searching for a religious answer to the problems of existence.