The Fornelle District between art and poetry

About this activity

The Fornelle Ward is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Salerno, the place where the poet was born and raised. Alfonso Gatto. At one time the walls and streets of the neighborhood were worn down by salt spray from the city's waterfront: today they have been transformed into beautiful open-air poetic performances.

To date, the neighborhood, while retaining its "niche" identity, has been reevaluated, enjoying a new charm that attracts all passersby intrigued by the contrast between the modernity of the street art and the essential and popular nature of the place.

Thanks to the Muri d'Autore project, implemented together with the Alfonso Gatto Foundation, Italian and foreign artists, including Ivan Tresoldi and Carlos Atoche, have given new life to the facades of the area's alleys through a series of colorful murals and poetic verses. The Ward has acquired a new identity, urbanistic, cultural and touristic.

The idea was born at the end of the First World Conference of the Hundred Thousand Poets for Change movement, which originated in California in 2011 and took place in Salerno. It is precisely the poetic note that is what distinguishes this urban revalorization from classic street art works; in addition to the original phrases, street names and house numbers, which have long since been nonexistent, were also redesigned.

The project, coordinated by poet Valerian Strong and artist Pino Roscigno, initially started with the creation of a mural of GreenPine outside the Ward on the steps of the Mutilated Ward. Subsequently, the intervention focused on the walls of the Fornelle, going beyond just the city's connection to Alfonso Gatto, and seeking to decorate the spaces with references to the sea, dialect and the works and portraits of other artists including Pino Daniele, Totò and Massimo Troisi. In fact, walking in the neighborhood, you may encounter to which image refers to the real find Neptune intent on dedicating a love poem by Gatto to the mermaid depicted on the opposite wall, facing a pretty window with a kitten; another curious depiction is that of the face of Apollo, slow of a head of Apollo in the Gulf of Salerno on December 2, 1930, which also evoked and inspired Ungaretti and which today can be admired at the city's Archaeological Museum.

This wonderful cultural initiative also aims to make art and reading accessible to everyone, from the youngest to the oldest, enhancing the most hidden corners of Salerno and making the neighborhood, once considered dangerous, a new tourist destination. Welcoming visitors to the Rione, near the Masaniello steps, is precisely a depiction of Alfonso Gatto, whose image has been immortalized with his usual cigarette between his lips and piercing ice-colored eyes.

The heart of the district is Matteo d'Aiello Square, where there is an 18th-century fountain whose author is anonymous even today. This place is the gathering place for local residents, where they gather with chairs in the street or in front of their doorways to chat, gossip and eat with each other.

A great new feature introduced a few years ago is the elevator that leads to the upper city, directly to the famous Minerva Gardens, the ancient botanical gardens where students of the Salerno Medical School studied.

The history of the Fornelle Ward

Le Fornelle was born as a neighborhood in the 9th century, when Amalfitans were forcibly transferred here by the Lombard prince Sicardo. The neighborhood, once known as Vicus sancte Trophimene, in fact revolved around the Church of Santa Trofimena, patron saint of Minori and the Amalfitans, and lived mainly from fishing and maritime traffic. The particular name of the neighborhood probably derives from the Amalfitans' tradition of making ceramics, for the making of which they built apposite kilns, many of them located in the very district.

The neighborhood has its roots in a distant and detached community in the Historic Center, even unknown to many Salernitans. The whole area was devastated by the terrible flood of 1954; in fact, several buildings had to be torn down and then the twentieth-century public housing was built there.