This short correspondence is the first known composition by Saba to appear in print. In 1904, the nineteen-year-old Saba embarked on a walking trip with a friend from Kotor – the last Austrian city on the Adriatic – to Cetinje, at the time the capital of the Kingdom of Montenegro. It was to prove an adventurous stay, which Saba recalled in the novella Come fui bandito dal Montenegro (“How I was banished from Montenegro”, 1913).
From the Montenegrin people he captured, in particular, the melancholy in the popular songs “which inspire feelings and images not dissimilar to those of Chopin’s music”: an emotional harmony which is also an explicit reference to the first artistic pseudonym of the young poet, Umberto Chopin Poli, with which he signed the poems written between 1900 and 1902. The correspondence was published on 14th July 1904 in the Trieste socialist newspaper “Il Lavoratore” where his friend Amedeo Tedeschi worked.
