Exhibition: "Trieste, Invention of My Soul." Ungaretti and Trieste: Chronicle of an Encounter

The exhibition Trieste, Invention of My Soul – Ungaretti and Trieste: Chronicle of an Encounter will open in the exhibition spaces on the second floor of the Stelio Crise State Library in Trieste on Saturday, September 27, 2025, at 6:00 PM.

The inauguration is part of the European Heritage Days 2025, the largest and most popular cultural event in Europe, promoted by the Council of Europe and the European Commission, and coordinated for Italy by the Ministry of Culture. The exhibition, curated by Stefano Crise and promoted by Cizerouno, is made possible thanks to funding from the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia (Ungaretti Call). The project partners are the Stelio Crise State Library and the Marcello Mascherini Archive.

Trieste, Invention of My Soul is the title of an unpublished book, conceived by Vanni Scheiwiller to document Giuseppe Ungaretti's 1968 stay in Trieste. Research conducted at the Bonsanti Archive in Florence uncovered preparatory materials for that project: a folder with handwritten notes by Stelio Crise, editorial instructions by Scheiwiller, and several loose sheets of paper, including a poem entitled "Trieste, Invention of My Soul." The relationship between Ungaretti and Trieste cannot be reduced to simplifications. It is not an organic bond, comparable to that which unites the poet to the Karst Plateau or to the memory of the war. Rather, Trieste is a web of episodic encounters, moments that sometimes produce concrete cultural effects, other times evoke only the distant reflection of youthful memories.

The exhibition reconstructs Ungaretti's four official encounters with Trieste and with the artistic and cultural world of the city and the region. Through the reports of "Il Piccolo," which played a key mediating role, alternating high-profile texts with social news, and images from the Photo Library of the Civic Museums of History and Art, the faces and presences of those years resurface: Stelio Crise, Marcello Mascherini, Manlio Cecovini, Lojze Spacal, Biagio Marin, a young Fulvio Tomizza, and many others. Over time, media attention transformed Ungaretti into a familiar, almost spectacular figure: from poet to public figure, from intellectual to cultural icon. Radio and television helped amplify his image, making him recognizable even outside of literary circles. The exhibition also devotes space to this dimension through footage from the Rai Archives, magazines, and newsreels of the time, as well as a series of photographic portraits that, alongside his public face, portray the more intimate aspects of his personality. Ungaretti wrote extensively, especially letters: from this epistolary abundance emerges a method based on listening, reworking, and refracting experience. It is no coincidence that his poems are deliberately absent from the exhibition: they are not used as a direct source to reconstruct his character or voice. Instead, the focus is on a documentary narrative that conveys the shifting and elusive tone of his relationship with Trieste. The city, like other places the poet visited, presents itself as a fragment of an interior landscape: marginal yet a laboratory of coexistence, memories, and visions. For Ungaretti, who throughout the twentieth century carried with him the poetic word as a form of salvation, Trieste is one of the many inventions of the soul. Perhaps one of the most discreet, as befits it, but no less authentic for that.

The exhibition will be open until February 6, 2026, during the Library's opening hours (Monday-Thursday 8:30 am to 6:30 pm, Friday 8:30 am to 1:30 pm, closed Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays).
Free entrance