A leading intellectual figure in Salerno in the 20th century. A poet, first and foremost, linked to the most important experience of the century for Italian poetry, hermeticism, marking the renewal of Italian poetry. His overflowing vitality and his search for new forms of expression have seen him as a journalist, prose writer, anti-fascist politician, children's author, militant literary critic and art critic, and finally a painter, with drawings and paintings that go far beyond the quality of a good amateur. Alfonso Gatto elaborates a complex aesthetic vision, fueled by direct contact with some of the great artists of the century: a supporter of an intense and personal lyricism, at times surrealist, his painting, which moved between the topographical space of Salerno, Rome and Milan and Florence, and the transcendental one of thoughts in which the two extremes are landing and nostalgia.