Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, Egypt into a family from the Tuscan city of Lucca. As a child, he was nursed by a Nubian nurse named Bahita, and, as an adult, claimed that her influence accounted for his own exoticism. Ungaretti's father worked on digging the Suez Canal, where he suffered a fatal accident in 1890. His widowed mother, born in Kotor (today Montenegro), who ran a bakery on the edge of the Sahara, educated her child on the basis of Roman Catholic tenets.