Umberto (Poli) Saba

Born in Trieste, Austro-Hungarian Empire (today in Italy), Umberto Saba (b. Poli) was brought up by his mother in Trieste’s ghetto. A niece of the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholar Samuel David Luzzatto, Saba’s mother Felicità Rachele Poli (b. Cohen) had been abandoned by her husband while pregnant, and she reared Umberto as a single parent. Saba attended trade school but did not complete his studies, instead pursuing employment as a merchant mariner and eventually serving a compulsory year in the Italian military until 1908. He published his first collections of verse during this period, and in 1909 married Carolina Wölfler, with whom he had a daughter the following year. During World War I, Saba wrote briefly for Il Popolo d’Italia, a pro-war daily founded by Benito Mussolini, before being conscripted back into the military. Following World War I, Saba purchased a bookstore in Trieste and became an antiquarian bookseller, a career he maintained for several decades and one that financed his poetry. In 1921, he published Il canzoniere (The Songbook), the work for which he is best known. He revised and expanded it in multiple editions until his death.