«questo corpo che ora troppo ci pesa»: pesantezza e leggerezza nel Porto Sepolto

The paper examines the heaviness / lightness dichotomy that, according to Milan Kundera, is «the most mysterious and most ambiguous of all oppositions». Although the 1916 Porto Sepolto may at first seem dominated by the burden of war, by mud, by life in the trenches an by death, as a matter of fact many poems in the collection play on the duplicity of images that refer to both semantic fields. In the hic et nunc of war and of worldly pain, the poet-soldier Ungaretti actually searches for the absence of weight, and he looks for it in the dream, in the imagination, in the panic fusion with the universe, but his search of levitas often reveals itself as a search fot faith. There's no true opposition between lightness and heaviness. The compresence of the two poles of the dichotomy is unavoidable, as it is intrinsic in the life of men on earth.