With his book Duonnu Pantu and the Gapulieri, Tonino De Paoli — writer, researcher and musician born in Aprigliano (Cosenza) — gives voice to a poet from his own town, Duonnu Pantu, and opens a new way of reading the freedom of speech: the one that, from the seventeenth century, reaches us.
by Rocco Femia
What remains of scandal today, in an age scandalized by everything except injustice? Perhaps only the word remains. The word that dares to say what those in power would prefer to keep silent.
And four centuries ago, in Calabria, among the hills of Aprigliano (Cosenza), that word took the name Duonnu Pantu. Born in the heart of the 17th century, when the Church and civil authorities controlled every gesture, Duonnu Pantu was much more than a poet: he was a collective voice.
Tonino De Paoli, also from Aprigliano, demonstrates this in his book, with patience and rigor, digging through archives, fragments, oral voices and verses that survived censorship. Duonnu Pantu and the Gapulieri (The Writer Edizioni, 2024), De Paoli gives voice to this figure and, with a fascinating intuition, reveals its greatest secret: Duonnu Pantu is, at the same time, a single man and the choral name of a poetic community. Working alongside that priest-poet is, in fact, a brotherhood of writers, religious figures, and intellectuals, the Gapulieri, who in the Calabrian seventeenth century wrote together, mixing sacred and profane, Latin and dialect, faith and desire.
A sort of poetic laboratory ante litteram, where laughter served to exorcise fear and words became freedom.
It's a courageous thesis, but also a profoundly human one: because in reconstructing the legend, De Paoli doesn't close a mystery—he opens others, closer to us, those concerning the relationship between truth, censorship, and desire.
From this perspective, his book is not a simple philological investigation: it is an anthropological and moral rereading of our history. It shows that behind the licentious laughter and erotic verses lay a higher purpose—an idea of civil and intellectual freedom that predates unified Italy by centuries.
Like Ruzzante, Duonnu Pantu uses dialect not only as a language, but as a political gesture: a form of truth that arises from below, from the fields, from the taverns, from the rooms where “official” culture did not reach.
Both put the people on stage, not to idealize them, but to give them back their voice and dignity — against any authority that claims to speak in their place.
Pasolini will inherit this same vision, but will push it higher: in Life boys or in Gospel according to Matthew the body becomes revelation, a language of truth and grace.
In Duonnu Pantu, however, the flesh remains a body—concrete, shameless, never domesticated. But precisely in this nakedness, a similar truth speaks: that of man without mediation, free to express desire, hunger, and life.
And finally Dario Fo: in his Joke, as in the octaves of the Calabrian priest-poet, laughter is never simple entertainment, but a rite of collective liberation, a secular liturgy that reverses roles and gives the people back the power of the word.
In all four—from Pantu to Fo—poetry becomes the theatre of the world, where telling the truth is always an act of courage.
But this book's greatest merit lies elsewhere: it has restored dialect to its dignity as a cognitive language. Not folklore, not linguistic curiosity, but an instrument of truth.
In the raw language of Duonnu Pantu—the language of flesh, hunger, and desire—De Paoli recognizes the first form of Italian expressive democracy: the ability to say everything, even to God.
And in his poems, boldness is never gratuitous: eroticism becomes the language of freedom.
In Cazzeide, the poet celebrates an innocent golden age, and then lashes out against the degeneration of customs and the lust of his contemporaries: «To the wife lu husband sulu/ was sprung lu fisticchiarulu…» (“Only the husband touched the wife…”) an image of lost modesty that opens the way to the condemnation of a world now overwhelmed by vice: «Lu bad pigliàu asks, or if it gets lost / ham empty teas find always horns!» (“Evil has taken hold, and everywhere you turn you find only horns!”).
In this bitter laughter lies all the strength of a satire that unmasks the society of the time, where religion and sin dance the same tarantella.
And in the Cunneide the perspective is reversed: the poet praises the power of female desire as a cosmic, vital, thaumaturgical principle: «Si nun fuossi pped'illa who's in it?nnorca, / theman would be devil 'incarnate…» (“If it were not for her who dominates us, man would be an incarnate devil…”).
It is certainly a primordial and liberating eroticism, which Duonnu Pantu opposes to the ecclesiastical morality of the time.
Sex becomes language, pleasure knowledge, and woman—"erva cunnilla," the herb of desire, as he calls her—a pacifying force in the world. Of course, read today, this imagery can offend contemporary sensibilities, especially at a time when women still struggle against forms of domination and degrading representations. Tonino De Paoli explains beautifully in the book that the poet's erotic universe is never predatory or misogynistic: it is archetypal, and indeed attributes to women a power of redemption, of cosmic, almost divine balance. This vision, then, stems from a peasant and baroque culture, where sexuality was both language and popular theology. But in the context of Duonnu Pantu, that "ervacunnilla" is not an object of possession: it is a vital principle, a saving energy, precisely, that calms instinct and redeems man from his violence. In a society marked by religion, superstition, and fear of the body, Duonnu Pantu's erotic word is, paradoxically, an act of liberation: it restores to women the power that the Church had taken from them, that of being the origin and measure of the world.
A shockingly modern intuition, which Tonino De Paoli traces back to a very human vision of the divine: eros as the path to truth.
As De Paoli himself writes: "Research is science, and it must be nourished by truth. And truth is nothing other than correspondence to the facts."
And further on he adds: «Some, accusing him of immorality and holding him up to contempt, have hoped that his verses be burned in public squares […] For them, Duonnu Pantu would be a herald of immorality, a corrupter of morals, in other words, a cursed poet.»
Three centuries before Freud or Pasolini, these words describe a still scandalous truth: morality doesn't repress desire, it multiplies it. And all hypocrisy is, ultimately, an attempt to deny humanity.
Behind the linguistic license, behind the exuberant eroticism, lies a lucid critique of the society of his time—of double standards, of religion as control, of desires hidden behind the veil of modesty.
And in some ways, it almost seems like a reading of our present, with its superficial morals and the same hunger for freedom. The unsparing condemnation of the hypocrisy of power and customs sounds like an even more timely warning today.
If censorship burned books in the streets back then, today it risks burning people on social media, with the same cold efficiency. The form of silence has changed, not the fear that produces it.
With this work, Tonino De Paoli not only restores a poet to literature, but restores a conscience to a land.
A son of Aprigliano who finds another son of Aprigliano, separated by four centuries but united by the same faith in the word.
And it reminds us that freedom is not inherited: it is exercised, every day, with the courage to call things by their name.
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