In un caffè remoto: l’Alessandria greca e non greca di Ungaretti

Abstract

Giuseppe Ungaretti’s autobiographical texts repeatedly insist on his contacts with the group of young writers who gave rise to the important periodical Grammata (1911-1921) in Alexandria, Egypt, under the auspices of Constantine Cavafy. However, a closer analysis shows that Ungaretti’s ties with the Greek community in Alexandria were probably not that strong after all. In fact, his own later memories reveal themselves to be inaccurate and contradictory, and references in his work to the glorious Hellenistic and imperial past (so dear to Cavafy) of Alexandria are exceedingly rare, for Ungaretti saw the city predominantly in an “Arab” light. Moreover, not only was any direct linguistic contact with the Greeks (and thus with Cavafy’s poetry) impaired by the linguistic divide, despite the mediation of French, but the contacts with Grammata (whose first issue was published a few months before Ungaretti’s departure from Egypt) were also clearly short-lived, and his ties with the so-called “Apuani” (led by the Cretan George Vrissimitsakis) weakened after 1914. Finally, it is striking that in 1917 Grammata published a very harsh review of the Allegria, written by the Sardinian writer and journalist Romolo Garbati, a member of those Italo-Egyptian anarchist circles that had attracted Ungaretti in his early youth, though not in his later years.