After graduating, barely eighteen years old, Quasimodo he left Sicily with which he would maintain an oedipal link, and settled in Rome.
In this period he continued to write poetry and studied Latin and Greek with Monsignor Rampolla, in the Vatican State. In 1926 he was appointed to the Ministry of Public Works and assigned to the Civil Engineers of Reggio Calabria. Surveying activities, exhausting and quite alien to his literary interests, seemed to draw him further and further away from poetry and, perhaps for the first time, he considered abandoning his poetic ambitions.
However, the approach to Sicily, the resumption of contacts with his friends from his early youth and especially the joy of friendship with Salvatore Pugliatti, an eminent jurist and connoisseur of poetry, rekindled his dormant will and made him Quasimodo will take up the verses of the Roman decade, to revise and add new ones.
In 1934 he moved to Milan, the city that would mark a particularly significant turn in his life, not just artistic. Welcomed into the group of “power” he found himself in the midst of a kind of literary society, which included poets, musicians, painters, sculptors.
In 1936 he published with G. Scheiwiller “Eratus and Apollyon“, thus ending the hermetic phase of his poetry. In 1938 he left his job at the Department of Civil Engineering and began to work as editor-in-chief of Cesare Zavattini, who later made him join the editorial office of the weekly” Il Tempo “In 1938 his first great anthology came out.”Poems“, with an introductory essay by Oreste Macri, which remained as one of the fundamental contributions of quasimodal criticism.
In the period 1939-40 Quasimodo developed the translation of the Greek lyric that was published in 1942; also in 1942 was launched “And the night came fast. “
In 1941 he was awarded, for his renown, the chair of Italian literature at the “Giuseppe Verdi” Conservatory of Music in Milan. Quasimodo he taught there until his death.
During the war, despite a thousand difficulties, Quasimodo continued working: without stopping writing poetry, he translated Carmina di Catullo, parts of the Odyssey, The flower of the Georgics, the Gospel according to John Y Epido King of Sophocles. Quasimodo He would continue this work as a translator in the following years, in parallel to its production and with excellent results, thanks to his refined experience as a writer. His numerous translations include works by Ruskin, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Moliere, and even Cummings, Neruda, Aiken, Euripides, Eluard (the last published posthumously).
In 1950 he was awarded the San Babila Prize and in 1953 the Etna-Taormina together with Dylan Thomas. In 1954 he published “The false and true green“, a book on the crisis, which began with a third phase of the poetry of Quasimodo, which reflected the changing political climate. The new language became more complex and harsher. In 1958 he traveled to the USSR where he had a heart attack, which was followed by a long stay at the Botkin Moscow hospital.
On December 10, 1959, in Stockholm, Salvatore quasimodo received the Nobel Prize of Literature. The Nobel was followed by many writings and articles about his work, with an increase in translations. In 1960 the University of Messina awarded him an honorary doctorate, in addition to honorary citizenship by the municipality.
His last job, “Give and take“It was in 1966: it was a collection in which he takes stock of his own life, almost a spiritual testament (the poet would die two years later). In 1967 the University of Oxford conferred the Honoris Causa Prize on him.
The works of the poet Nobel Prize in Literature were translated into forty languages and are studied in all countries of the world.