Alfonso Gatto

Alfonso Gatto is the most important intellectual figure in Salerno of 900.

Poeta, first of all, linked to the most important experience of the century for Italian poetry, hermetism, which following the masters Montale and Ungaretti, saw together with Our, Salvatore Quasimodo, Mario Luzi, Leonardo Sinisgalli, marking the renewal of Italian poetry.

But locking Gatto in the back of poetry, to which his literary fame is linked, is poor and unjust. His overflowing vitality and his search for new forms of expression, they reviewed him as a journalist (also athletic), prosecutor, anti-fascist politician (he was arrested in 1936 for political reasons and participated in the Resistance), author for children, literary critic militant and art critic, and finally painter, with drawings and paintings that go well beyond the quality of a good amateur.

His poetry and his life are segregated by love, a theme that intertwines with others – starting from the political commitment – and that distinguishes all his poetic production, lasting more than forty years, from the publication of the first book, Isola (1934) until his death.

Born in Salerno, he studied at Liceo Tasso, but abandoned his studies due to lack of economic means, and went to Milan, beginning a life of pilgrimages, between the Lombard capital, then Florence, Rome, always subjecting the call of Salerno, which never abandoned in verses (Salerno, rima d’inverno), than in the frequentation.

He loved his Old Town – he was born in the middle of the Fornelles, in via delle Galesse – and frequented with passion the restaurant Vicolo della Neve, on whose walls are still engraved some written verses of his fist.

His first poems were published, with attention to the major critics, in the Milanese period, already in the 1930s; his transfer to Florence also marked a militant literary vocation, through the direction of a literary magazine, Campo di Marte for the publisher Vallecchi. He taught in Bologna for a short time, finding some economic security, but then

he entered the Resistance, joining the Communist Party, from which he appeared polemically in 1951. In the militancy period,

he worked at the communist newspaper L’Unità, also collaborating with Gianni Rodari. And of this period it is nice to remember his chronicles from the Giro d’Italia, who saw him sent for a sport that at the time was the most followed by fans; and the passion for the bicycle accompanied also one, told himself, inability to carry it, something abnormal at a time when everyone pedaled. This inability brought him, after an unhappy lesson of the greatest possible master, Fausto Coppi, to write the verses we put in the epigraph: “I will fall, always until the last day of life, but dreaming of flying”. He was also a football fan, of Milan, first of all, but with a passion for Salernitana, who made him write hates to the C series.

He died in 1976 in a road accident. He was buried in the city, where he rests with a commiate written by Montale: To Alfonso Gatto for whom life and poetry were a single witness of love.

Salerno remembers it with an important road, but not quite beautiful – the viaduct Gatto that takes from the Coast to the commercial port – but especially with a series of works of street art. First, with the staircase leading to the Rione Mutilati from via Velia,

with images and poems by the artist Green Pino. And then with the very interesting operation desired and produced by the Foundation that takes its name from it, in its district of the Fornelle, where various street artists have enriched the walls of the district of murals dedicated to him and his poems, but also to other poets, transforming the ancient medieval district of the Amalfins into an open-air museum.