Echo of the Carso

June 1st, 1970. Giuseppe Ungaretti, eighty-two years old, wakes at dawn on his last day of life. Something calls him back, toward the places that forged him.
The short film weaves two temporal planes: the elderly poet undertaking a dreamlike journey across the Carso, and the young twenty-eight-year-old infantryman who in 1916 wrote verses in the trenches while his companions died beside him. Time bends — the old man traces the word "TIME" on the fogged window, the young man the same word in the mud. Two identical gestures separated by fifty years.
The poet's soul crosses the landscapes of memory: the Ungaretti Park, the old field hospital with soldiers' graffiti carved into the walls, the trenches where the stone still holds the echo of bombardments. Here he encounters his own young ghost — a soldier frantically digging in the mud while shells explode and someone screams "Gas! Gas!", desperately searching for his notebook. "I'm looking for something," he answers those who ask if he's lost his mind.
In the present, the old man's hands sink into the same earth and find an old bullet corroded by time. A relic of the war that never left him.
The journey ends on the panoramic terrace, with the Isonzo flowing in the distance. Ungaretti sits on a stone bench, places the bullet beside him, and speaks his final words: "This is my Carso."
The cane slips to the ground. The poet does not move.
Fade to black: June 1st, 1970.
"Death is paid for by living."