Alfonso Gatto

Alfonso Gatto is the most important intellectual figure of 20th-century Salerno. A poet, first and foremost, linked to the most important experience of the century for Italian poetry, Hermeticism, which, following the masters Montale and Ungaretti, saw together with Ourselves, Salvatore Quasimodo, Mario Luzi, Leonardo Sinisgalli, marking the renewal of Italian poetry. But to confine Gatto to the ranks of poetry, to which his literary fame is linked anyway, is poor and unfair. His overflowing vitality and his search for new forms of expression saw him again as a journalist (including a sportswriter), prose writer, anti-fascist politician (he was arrested in 1936 for political reasons and participated in the Resistance), children’s author, militant literary critic and art critic, and finally as a painter, with drawings and paintings that go far beyond the quality of a good amateur.
His poetry and his life are marked by love, a theme that is intertwined with others – starting with political engagement – and that marks all his poetic production, which lasted more than forty years, from the publication of his first book, Isola (1934) until his death.
He was born in Salerno, studied at the Liceo Tasso, but abandoned his studies due to lack of economic means, and went to Milan, beginning a life of wanderings, between the Lombard capital, then Florence, Rome, always suffering, however, the call of Salerno, which he never abandoned both in verse (Salerno, rhyme of winter), and in frequentation. He loved his Centro Storico – he was born in the middle of the Fornelle, on Via delle Galesse – and frequented with passion the restaurant Vicolo della Neve, on whose walls some verses written in his own hand are still engraved.
His first poems were published, with attention from major critics, in the Milanese period, as early as the 1930s; his move to Florence also marked a militant literary vocation, through the editorship 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 joined the Resistance, enrolling in the Communist Party, from which he left polemically in 1951. During his period of militancy, he worked at the communist newspaper L’Unità, also collaborating with Gianni Rodari. And from this period it is nice to remember his chronicles from the Giro d’Italia, which saw him correspondent for a sport that at the time was the most followed by fans; and the passion for the bicycle was also accompanied by an, which he himself recounted, inability to carry it, which was anomalous in a time when everyone pedaled. This inability led him, after an unfortunate lesson from the greatest possible master, Fausto Coppi, to write the verses we put in the epigraph: “I will fall, I will fall, always until the last day of life, but dreaming of flying.” He was also a soccer fan, Milan first and foremost, but with a passion for Salernitana as well, which made him write odes to Serie C.
He died in 1976 in a car accident. He was buried in the city, where he rests with a sendoff written by Montale: To Alfonso Gatto for whom life and poems were a single testimony of love.
Salerno remembers him with an important but certainly not beautiful road-the Gatto viaduct leading from the Coast to the commercial port-but especially with a series of street art works. First, with the stairway leading to the Rione Mutilati from Via Velia, with images and poems by artist Green Pino. And then with the very interesting operation desired and produced by the Foundation named after him, right in his Fornelle district, where various street artists have enriched the walls of the neighborhood with murals dedicated to him and his poems, but also to other poets, transforming the very old medieval quarter of the Amalfitans into an open-air museum.