Il Galateo di Pietro Marti

The written work on Salento's humanist De Ferrariis, known as the Galateo, underlines the continued attention in the frenetic activity of journalist Pietro Marti (1863-1933), witnessed in the production of works such as Origini e fortuna della Coltura salentina (1895) and above all Nella Terra di Galateo: frammenti di bibliografia, di storia e di arte salentina (1930), in which Marti had identified in Galateo a "corpus" of ideas of 15th century humanistic inspiration, which were well suited to his irrational journalism and strongly rooted in controversy, typical of his temper. Much of the memorial-divulgatory effort present in the dozens of newspapers founded and directed by Marti between the 18th and 19th centuries in Puglia and the same production of about forty monographic works dedicated to personalities of Salento in every area of knowledge, with particular attention to the historical, literary and artistic context, placing the journalist from Lecce in the ranks of those who wanted to safeguard and recover the archaeological heritage and represent the expression of the culture of Salento, as reiterated in the passionate pages of Ruderi e Monumenti nella Penisola Salentina (1932). The patriotic memoir writer Pietro Marti, as Regio Ispettore Monumenti and then director of the Bernardini Provincial Library in Lecce, had certainly identified the great representativeness of the doctor-philosopher De Ferrariis as the coryphaeus of excellence of Salento, strong with a firm memory and millennial culture.