5th CILENTO FEST 2026 Cinema & Journalism Award to the director
Island
Places and Myths by Alfonso Gatto
A Solefilm production – an innovative start-up
Culture and Tourism Plan 2024/2025
DGRC 616 of 14 November 2024 and DGRC 217 of 17 April 2025: Tales of Campania
supported by Banca di Credito Cooperativo Campania – Centro-Cassa Rurale ed Artigiana Battipaglia
Battipaglia Rural Bank Foundation
in association with Iuppiter and the I Disinvolti Association
written by Maurizio Fiume
directed by Marcello Napoli
starring
Yari Gugliucci, Ludovica Ferraro, Ariele Fiume
narrator
Roberto De Francesco
featuring
Silvio Ramat
Virgilio D’Antonio, Alfonso Andria, Francesco d’Episcopo
Vincenzo Salerno, Filippo Trotta, Paolo Speranza
cinematography by Antonio Grambone
animations by Sole Fiume
edited by Alessandra Carchedi
executive producer: Maurizio Fiume
script consultants: Max de Francesco and Stefano Incerti
technical sound coordination: Daniele Chiariello
sound design: Fabio Sorrentino
colour correction: Simona Infante
Italy │ 53 minutes │ colour and b/w │ 4K
Logline
To draw from the poet Alfonso Gatto’s ability to see and not see, to speak of the unspoken and to do the unsaid.
Concept
ISOLA: Places and Myths of Alfonso Gatto is a documentary that brings Alfonso Gatto’s poetry to life in today’s places and lives, allowing it to resonate as a living voice of identity, memory and care.
A journey through Southern Italy where art becomes encounter, education and social cohesion.
A project that uses cinema to transform culture into a shared experience that shapes the future.
Synopsis
The documentary is an exploration of the places and cultural climate that were essential to Alfonso Gatto’s artistic career and his poetry, beginning with his first collection published in 1932, Isola, published by Edizioni Libreria di Napoli, which critics regard as the young author’s entry into the Italian hermetic movement.
The documentary film revolves around the theme of poetry as a refuge, as a happy and intimate space in which the poet can savour the pure joy of existence.
It lingers, at times evoking, at times explaining, and at times interpreting his poetic world, with the help of Silvio Ramat, his interpreter.
Alfonso Gatto (Salerno 1909 – Orbetello 1976) is one of the great Italian poets of the twentieth century.
He was born by the sea, into a family of sailors and small shipowners, and he would never truly stray far from that South: it would be his secret homeland, the source to which he returned throughout his life.
At a very young age, he left his studies due to financial difficulties and went through a turbulent period, working as a bookshop assistant, a journalist and a teacher.
He was just over twenty when, in 1932, he published his first book, Isola.
Those verses were enough for two leading figures in Italian poetry, Sandro Penna and Eugenio Montale, to take immediate notice of him and recognise his rare talent.
It marked the beginning of a journey that would establish him as one of the leading figures of Hermeticism, the poetic movement of the 1930s that sought a pure, essential word capable of saying a great deal with very little.
But Gatto was not merely a poet of the school.
Arrested for anti-fascism, he later joined the Resistance, and his poetry spanned the war, becoming a civic voice – wounded yet bearing witness.
In his later years, he rediscovered a more relaxed and luminous style, which revisited the South, memory and family ties.
He was also a prose writer, an author of children’s books, a painter and a watercolourist.
The title of that first book, Isola, says it all about him: his sense of belonging to a land and, at the same time, the solitude of someone who carries that land within them wherever they go.
This is where the film begins its story of him.
Press Book