Cutro was a town 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 due to 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 clay monoliths, biancane and hills cultivated with wheat and for this reason defined as "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 enters an area, all yellow, with hills that 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 more... " In Calabria the most serious of crimes was committed, 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 ahead 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 stated: “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 to write the poem "Kudros" in which I tried to best collect the spirit with which he perceived and reproduced the incredible aura of that land.