Il Porto Sepolto was written in the trenches of northern Italy while Giuseppe Ungaretti was serving as a private in the Italian army; when the collection was published in Udine in 1916, it changed Italian poetry. Part of its impact was due to the influence of Japanese poetry, which Ungaretti had recently encountered in Italian translation. In his introduction, Irish poet and Tokyo resident Andrew Fitzsimons explores the nature and history of Ungaretti's engagement with Japanese poetics; the book also includes sixteen vibrant illustrations by another Tokyo resident, the renowned Italian artist Sergio Maria Calatroni. This is the only complete translation into English of the Udine first edition: the poems of a 'man present at his own / fragility' that spoke to their moment, and continue to speak one hundred years later.

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970), called by T. S. Eliot 'one of the most authentic poets of Western Europe,' was, along with Eugenio Montale, the most significant Italian poet of the twentieth century. His first book, Il Porto Sepolto, was written while he served as an infantryman in World War 1. It was followed by five further books of poetry, including Il Dolore (Sorrow, 1947), on the death of his nine-year old son, Antonio,and culminating in his collected poems, Vita d'un uomo (The Life of a Man) in 1969. His travel writings and essays were collected in Il Deserto e Dopo (The Desert and Afterwards, 1961). He died on 2 June, 1970, in Milan.