Biography
Salvatore Quasimodo (August 20, 1901 - June 14, 1968) was an Italian novelist, journalist, and poet, one of the most prominent figures in 20th-century Italian poetry. Born in Syracuse, Sicily, his mother was Greek (Rosa Papandreou), his father an Italian railway official. He began technical studies at the University of Rome, but did not complete them. From Rome he went to Milan where he worked as a journalist and later as a teacher of Italian literature.He lived in many Italian cities and met the greatest Italian writers of the time. Although he wrote his first poems at a young age (in 1917), he began to publishe them much later (in 1930). He worked on translations of great English and Spanish poets such as Shakespeare and Neruda as well as Greek poetry collections. In 1945 he became a member of the Italian Communist Party.
His poetry in its first period, has lyrical tones and nostalgic memories from Sicily of his childhood, as well as the classical antiquity, Greek and Roman. After the traumatic experience of the war, Quasimondo's poetry acquires a dramatic character and is enriched with references to the social and political struggles of the post-war era to end, in his later work, as a poetry of a deeper existential search. In 1959 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died in 1968 in Amalfi, of a cerebral hemorrhage.