The Italian poet and translator Eugenio Montale was born to a middle-class family in Genoa. He was the youngest of seven children, six boys and one girl. When he was fifteen, he told his parents that he wanted to be an opera singer, and he began to cultivate his baritone voice in a music academy. But he had to stop when his teacher, the famous Ernesto Camillo Sivori, died and Montale was drafted to fight in the First World War.