Umberto Saba
| Umberto Saba | |
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Umberto Saba, 1951
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| Born | Umberto Poli 9 March 1883 Trieste, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 26 August 1957 (aged 74) Gorizia, Italy |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet |
| Language | Italian |
| Genre | Fiction, poetry |
| Literary movement | Crepuscolarismo |
| Spouse | Carolina (Lina) Wölfler (m. 1909–1956; 1 child) |
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Umberto Saba (9 March 1883 – 26 August 1957) was an Italian poet and novelist, born Umberto Poli in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean port of Trieste when it was the fourth largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Poli assumed the nom de plume "Saba" in 1910, and his name was officially changed to Umberto Saba in 1928. From 1919 he was the proprietor of an antiquarian bookshop in Trieste. He suffered from depression all his adult life.
Saba's Christian father, 29-year-old Ugo Eduardo Poli, converted to Judaism in order to marry 37-year-old Felicita Rachele Coen in July 1882. Felicita was one month pregnant with Umberto at the time of the wedding. Ugo abandoned his new wife and faith before Umberto was born and the child was raised first by a Slovene Catholic wet-nurse, Gioseffa Gabrovich Schobar ("Peppa"), and her husband, who had just lost a child, and from 1887 onwards by his mother, in her sister Regina's home, though Umberto maintained a close lifelong attachment to Peppa.(p. 528)
Saba was a keen reader who kept pet birds and studied the violin.(pp. xix, 528) In 1897 he transferred from the Gymnasium to a commercial college, the Imperial Academy of Commerce and Navigation, and then went to work in the office of a customs agent.
In 1900 he began composing poetry, signing his work "Umberto Chopin Poli." In January 1903 Saba travelled to Pisa to study archaeology, German and Latin, but began to complain of a nervous disorder and, in June, returned to Trieste. After a holiday in Slovenia, he spent some time later that year in Switzerland, writing a play. In July 1904, the socialist newspaper, Il Lavoratore, edited by his friend Amadeo Tedeschi, published Saba's account of a visit to Montenegro earlier in the year, and in May 1905, Il Lavoratore printed his first published poem. In 1905 he travelled to Florence with friends and – upon meeting his father for the first time – changed his nom de plume to "Umberto da Montereale," after the town of his father's birth. That summer he met Carolina (Lina) Wölfler, and began corresponding with her the following December. Between 1907 and 1908 he completed an obligatory year of Italian military service in an infantry unit based in Salerno. He married Lina in a Jewish ceremony in 1909, and they had a daughter, Linuccia, the following year.(p. xix)
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