This is a series of interdependent essays on Murilo Mendes which focus on different aspects of his work, particularly the texts he wrote in Italy, where he lived from 1957 until his death in 1975. The thread that implicitly runs through these essays is his relationship with the Western cultural repertoire, an aspect that stands out in both his poetry and his prose. Indeed, it is this that differentiates him from other Modernist writers. Murilo Mendes was not interested in setting one culture against another, but in uniting them in such a way that their differences were not represented hierarchically, such as center versus periphery. The metaphor of the collector that appears in the first chapter serves as a key for analyzing his body of prose from the Western tradition. His Brazilian-style surrealism is the object of another essay that discusses the particular way he incorporated the European vanguards of the early twentieth century. The third chapter is about his universalism. Overall, this study seeks to address the work of Murilo Mendes using the essay form as defined by Adorno, where points in the different texts interweave like a tapestry. The style is more experimental than strictly systematic or conclusive in its thinking.