Alfonso Gatto

Alfonso Gatto (17 July 1909 – 8 March 1976) was an Italian writer.

Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century and a major exponent of hermetic poetry.

Gatto studied at the Salerno classic lycaeum, where he discovered his passion for poetry and literature.

In 1926 he attended the University of Naples Federico II, but he had to discontinue his studies due to financial problems.

Like many Italian poets of his age, such as Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo, he never graduated.

Gatto fell in love with Jole, the daughter of his mathematics teacher, and at the age of 21, he eloped with her to Milan.

He worked many different jobs: bookshop assistant, college instructor, proofreader, journalist, and teacher.

However, the publication of his first book of poems in 1932, entitled Isola ("Island"), was highly welcomed as a truly new lyrical voice.

When Giuseppe Ungaretti published in the same year his Sentimento del tempo ("The Feeling of Time", 1933), he included Gatto in a relevant chapter, notwithstanding the latter's very recent arrival on the literary scene.

With Isola, Gatto commenced his poetical existence, which concluded with his tragic death forty-four years later.

Isola represents a decisive text for the construction of a hermetic grammar which will be defined by the poet himself, as a quest for a "natural absoluteness".

His language is rarefied and timeless, allusive, and typical of a poetics of "absence" and empty space, rich in melodic motives.

In 1936, due to his anti-fascist activism, he was arrested and jailed at the San Vittore prison in Milan.

During those years, Gatto had been a contributor to various innovative journals and magazines of the Italian literary culture.

In 1938 he founded the magazine Campo di Marte together with writer Vasco Pratolini and commissioned by Italian publisher Vallecchi, but it only lasted a year.

It had been created as a fortnightly magazine (first issued on 1 August 1938) and with the specific remit of educating the public in the artistic and literary production of all genres.

The magazine was directly connected with the so-called Florentine Hermeticism.

Founding the magazine was a significant experience for Gatto, who was able to enter the leading literary circles.

These will be the main elements of all of Gatto's output: these elements, in fact so distant from traditional models, are found in all his poems until 1939 and will gradually pass from familiar themes and landscape visions from youth, to a new phase, before and after World War II, which opens with his Arie e motivi ("Arias and motifs") and culminates with Poesie d'amore ("Love poems").

Gatto's motif of love is sung in all possible manners and to all possible directions and, even if with classicist tones, never loses the phonic value of words, as they become their own moment of suggestion.

In the period between 1940 and 1941, the poet revised his previous poems – which would later be included in a collection published in 1941 under the title Poesie ("Poems") – and they did not undergo changes until 1961 when, by giving them a better chronological and inspirational order in a new volume, they achieved Gatto's greatest lyricism.

One of the most vivid images of modern Italian poetry can be found in his poem Oblio, where the poet expresses the joy of life he feels, and which becomes memory and celebration:

In 1941 Gatto was appointed professor of Italian literature for "high merits", at the Art School of Bologna, and a special correspondent for the newspaper L'Unità, thus being placed in a primary position for the promotion of literature of communist inspiration.

Subsequently, Gatto abandoned the Italian Communist Party and became a dissident communist.

In these verses, one can detect a disappearance of strict analogy, part of Gatto's first books, and in his Amore della vita ("Love of Life") of 1944, he will succeed in conveying a rare vigour to a rhetorical moment dedicated to the Italian Resistance.

As a matter of fact, Gatto adhered to the poetry of Italian resistance, moved by the Italians' civil and political spirit, and in his subsequent collection of poetry, Il capo sulla neve ("The head in the snow"), he will create forceful and emotional words for the "Martyrs of the Resistance", expressing them in poems of deep meditation and poignant immediacy.

Gatto is thus a poet of nature and instinct, who continuously reinvigorates his poetic form and narrative structure, including in them a lyrical self-analysis and historical sense of participation.

In reading his latest works – Rime di viaggio per la terra dipinta ("Rhymes for journeying in the painted land"), and Desinenze ("Declensions") – the latter published posthumously, the image lingers of a poet with a turbulent life, yet always happy to fix in memory all emotions, in a language rich of motifs and surprises.

Alfonso Gatto also appeared in various films.

In The Sun Still Rises (1946) by Aldo Vergano he was a train conductor.

Other roles he had in two films by Pier Paolo Pasolini: in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) he was the apostle Andrew, in Teorema (1968) he was a physician.

Gatto died in a car accident on 8 March 1976 at Capalbio in the province of Grosseto.

He is buried in the cemetery of Salerno and on his tomb (which has a boulder as its tombstone) is engraved his friend Montale's funeral farewell:

"Ad Alfonso Gatto / per cui vita e poesie / furono un'unica testimonianza/ d'amore"

Alfonso Gatto was one of the most important and active exponents of Hermeticism.

Not much is known about Gatto's first years in Salerno, which surely must have had a determinant role in his cultural background, and little is known also of his first readings, his first literary meetings, and his friends.

He also appeared in Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses) (1976) by Francesco Rosi where he was Nocio and in Caro Michele (1976), by Mario Monicelli, from the novel by Natalia Ginzburg, where he interpreted Michele's father.