Near Kudros (Cutro)

… where the imagination takes you by the hand

There are places where nature plays a decisive role in our thoughts and words sometimes struggle to express the enormous charm captured by the senses. Therefore it happens that to strengthen the idea of ​​beauty a synergy of expressive forms (painting, photography, storytelling, poetry, music …) comes to the aid which together make a creative effort useful to better make the idea of ​​how “powerful” the influence is. of a landscape.

This is where this need arises, the idea comes from Francesco Mercadante, passionate about painting and photography, who thought of an interaction between photography and poetry to bring out the best of Cutro’s beauty, of which he comes from, offering me the opportunity to to express in verse what he has captured with the lens. Let’s start by getting to know the story that crossed Cutro in broad terms, interspersing the news with the splendid shots by Francesco Mercadante that highlight a particular area …

Cutro was a place in ancient Magna Graecia and in Greek it was called Kyterion, Koutro / Kudros in Latin times, probably with the meaning of “potter” in Greek, since a lot of pottery was produced for its clayey nature. Jumping to the second half of the 1500s, under Spanish rule, it became the most important granary in the area until it obtained the title of city from King Philip II in 1575. On March 8, 1832, in the early hours of the day the city was destroyed by a disastrous earthquake and most of it was razed to the ground with hundreds of victims.

Until the mid-twentieth century, Cutro was the most populous and productive center in the area, but later it underwent an important emigration, first to Germany and later to northern Italy: in particular to Emilia and Lombardy. The largest community of Cutrese origin is located in Reggio Emilia

A pleasant climate for most of the year its peculiarity is the natural beauty of the area that includes Cutro and Roccabernarda where the so-called badlands give the landscape a suggestive, almost surreal face, also composed of monoliths of clay, biancane and hills cultivated with wheat and for this reason called “yellow dunes”.

They are the same dunes that Pier Paolo Pasolini in his reportage “The long sand road” published in the magazine Success in 1959, described as follows: “… Then the road leaves the sea and inside in an area, all yellow, with the hills that they look like dunes imagined by Kafka … Some peasants return on horseback, or on some very slow old carts, along the infernal road, without a tree around

Pasolini chose it to shoot some scenes of “The Gospel according to Matthew” and later affirmed that: “the Calabrian landscape is enhanced, with its marvelous natural contrasts, in which gentle slopes contrast with violent rocky jolts” … and again … “In Calabria was committed the most serious of crimes, for which no one will ever answer: the pure hope, the somewhat anarchic and childish hope of those who living before history, still has the whole of history in front of him, was killed. ”

The particularity of the area has been perfectly transferred into captivating images in the photographic reportage by Francesco Mercadante who has masterfully collected the suggestion and magic of the place and allows the observer to immerse himself in the enchantment, in that dose of “surreal” that hovers in the veiled and rarefied atmosphere of the views; as he himself affirmed: “What I photographed are not images but a reproduction of myself, that is the landscape that entered me and became a photograph. I set my camera to a long exposure then closed my eyes and photographed the yellow dunes. ”

I have never visited those places but Francesco’s “talking” images were an excellent guide and inspired me the poem “Kudros” in which I tried to best collect the spirit with which he perceived and reproduced the incredible aura of that land.

Kudros

where the body returns to clay dominates an ante-genesis silence, the light envelops, disorients, disconcerts the senses.

Bare clay, lizard in the sun, asking the wind for a weak breath

to the traveler the enthusiasm of the senses to grasp the elusive.

Beyond the dunes, an echo of stories and voices descends towards the coast,

clearer lights anticipate the sea but in this delirium of sand dwell the Inviolable, deep, Ionic mysteries of Oinotria.

Daniela Cerrato, April 2022