Un eremita singolare elogiato in vita dai suoi contemporanei. L'Heremita di Antonio De Ferrariis

Among the works of Antonio De Ferrariis, Dialogus de Heremita, composed between 1495 and 1498, and which left manuscript, poses the fundamental question on which character has inspired the author. Between the hypotheses considered plausible is the figure of Francesco di Paola (1416-1507), a taumaturgus also famous in Salento, who had prophesied the fall of Otranto. In fact, his wife, Caterina Morosini, Luigi Paladini, when he was ill, was taken as a councilor in Calabria in 1478. A detailed account of this is present in contemporary historiography and hagiography. It was thought therefore that it was the Paladini to briefly inform the entire Galateo, who after the death of his father and his studies at Casole, stayed in Naples between 1485 and 1498, enjoying the esteem of nobles and intellectuals. therefore it was aggregated with the Pontanian Academy. An uncomfortable work, even an ideal prodrome of Lutheranism, according to some correlated with the figure of Paolano ? obviously not mentioned ? described by Paladini: that anacoreta even in conflict with St. Peter and the saints of paradise staged by the Galateo, which in the Dialogue Heremita expresses his nostalgia for primitive, poor Christianity and governed by a Lenten practice similar to that practiced by Paolano. Just to that figure of Hermit "old bearded", or of the holy ascetic, who stands in the loving lyrical, the existential condition of the "peregrine of love", which escapes from the human consortium to become a kind of hermit in the woods, as was the Paolano, the Galateo posed a fervent praise on St. Peter's mouth, recalled in a novel set in France at the court of King Louis XII, as well as on the evolution of the papal title by Servus servorum Dei, had been sent to Dominus dominantium.