"Codice primitivo" di Paola Maritati, poetessa salentina

On Saturday, April 11, 2026, at 6:30 PM, at the "N. Bernardini" Provincial Library in Lecce (Piazzetta Carducci), the first presentation of *Codice primitivo*, the new poetry collection by Paola Maritati, will take place. This is the fifty-third volume in the poetry series published by Musicaos Editore. The book, submitted for the *Premio Strega Poesia 2026*, arrives three years after the release of the author's debut work, *Lingua volgare*. At the event, literary critic Luciano Pagano will engage in a dialogue with the poetess; the evening will also serve as a space for musical interaction between Maritati's verses and the music of Gradus Compagnia Musicale, featuring musicians Gaetano Fidanza, Fabrizio Nuzzo, and Carolina Cezza.

With her debut book *Lingua volgare* (Musicaos, 2023), poetess Paola Maritati had already made a name for herself in the stifling landscape of contemporary Italian poetry due to her depth of spirit, expressive energy, as well as notable inventiveness and semantic density. These initial lyrics evoke a sense of admired wonder in the reader, and at times, also a disturbing disorientation, amplified by the tumultuous and deliberately challenging rhythm that alternates elevated language with abrupt lexical solutions.

The title of the work also suggests the Author's intense study of language, which is "volgare" both because it can be trivial and because it aims to evoke the sense of a neo-language, somewhat akin to the Italian of its medieval origins. A modernity that is tangibly expressed through the use of hashtags accompanying the poems, which sometimes provide a key for navigating the verses, while at other times completely disorient the reader. Other crucial elements of Maritati's poetics include: her archetypal religiosity, which is not built on dogmas but on a deep, original, and universal spirituality, almost pre-rational and mythical; the alternation of nursery rhymes and disenchanted rhymes with more hermetic and "contemporary" poetic solutions; a tone that continually oscillates between sacred and profane, between sharp irony and pretentious sarcasm, between primordial emotions and hyper-current references.

The highly anticipated second collection, *Codice primitivo*, confirms and deepens this poetics. For Gian Carlo Lisi, in the *International Web Post*, Maritati's verses "move between existential reflection and metaphorical play, where poetry abandons any narrative linearity and prefers paradox, apparent nonsense, and surreal reflection." According to Mario Nanni, "intellectual freedom, inner freedom — expressed provocatively and irreverently — appears as the inspiring soul of this poetess's work."

However, it is Luciano Pagano who perhaps offers the most articulated and evocative reading of the volume. According to the critic, Maritati's poetry "moves in an indecipherable zone for most — now due to distance — and is crystal-clear to her, where the truth of what happens and the world are one thing." A code of investigation, Pagano continues, that "tells with sought-after and sharp spontaneity what we are made of, with emotions, gestures, fears; a code that is a rule inherent to our being, a program that becomes dialogue and retains nothing of conventions." In the collection, there are "everyday relationships that transit through power and poetry that moves through bodies, emotions that trigger controlled reactions and irrational desires"; a poetic truth that "suggests that every text, to be true, must erupt like a manifesto."

Maritati's poetry thus becomes, in Pagano's words, "a re-appropriation of one's original, primal, natural, original code, without someone writing the instructions for feeling and acting for us." The result is that "the 'primordial code' becomes an act of poetic hacking, a countercurrent virus that rises to the 'quore' of the cult of an artificial 'I' that believes itself intelligent because it accepts being artificial." A vision that culminates in a powerful image: "if religiosity and mystery become a poetic act of recognition and reunion, *Codice primitivo* is the prophecy of the present gathered in the cave of an electric sibyl."

*Gradus compagnia musicale* is an informal collective of operators in the artistic and predominantly musical fields promoted by Gaetano Fidanza.
Web: musicaos.org/codice-primiti...