Peo Alfonsi is the professional name of Paolo Alfonsi, a guitarist and composer born in 1967 in Iglesias, in the Sardinian province of South Sardinia. He graduated with the highest marks in classical guitar from the Conservatorio di Cagliari, added an honors diploma from the International Musical Interpretation Courses in Norcia, and pursued further study at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and the Nuoro Jazz seminars, building a career that has always run classical technique and jazz improvisation side by side.

His recording career opens in 2002 with Che C'è? (Splasc(H) Records), co-billed with bassist Sandro Fontoni and featuring Paolo Fresu as a guest on trumpet. In 1996 he had already won first prize at the Posada Jazz Project competition, in a duo with Massimo Ferra. In 2003 he formed the trio Ammentos with accordionist Fausto Beccalossi and double bassist Salvatore Maiore, recording the self-titled Ammentos (2004) and Remarkramer (2006) for the Velut Luna label; the latter, composed in part by the accordionist and bandleader Gorni Kramer, won the trio the Kramer Prize in 2008.

In 2006 the guitarist Al Di Meola invited him to join his quartet New World Sinfonia on a permanent basis, a partnership that produced hundreds of concerts worldwide, four albums and a DVD, and that continues today in an acoustic-guitar duo format the two also tour separately. Discogs documents the relationship across more than a decade of releases: an early joint credit on Andrea Parodi's Midsummer Night in Sardinia (2004, Unione Sarda), where Alfonsi and Di Meola both appear as sidemen alongside Gavino Murgia, followed by La Melodia (Live In Milano) (2008), He & Carmen - Live Concert (2008), Live From Seattle And Elsewhere (2009) and Morocco Fantasia (2011). Di Meola went on to write the English liner notes for Alfonsi's own Itaca (2009, EGEA).

Alfonsi's leader catalog runs in two parallel directions. The jazz-original side includes Amada (2006, a trio with Maiore and drummer Roberto Dani), Itaca (2009), Il Velo Di Iside (2012), Change Of Heart (2015, recorded with Spanish vocalist Iván López), Alma (2015, a duo with Maiore recorded for the audiophile label Fonè Jazz), Oyasin (2017, a trio with Maiore and Dani built around Alfonsi's childhood memories of Western films), and Nubìvago (2020, Playaudio), all composed largely of his own material. The classical side runs through Works For Lute Vol. 1 (2013, self-released), a recital of Bach's lute suites, and O Velho Lobo - Peo Alfonsi Plays Villa Lobos (2016, Abeat Records), a solo-guitar program of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos with Italian liner notes by Gabriele Mirabassi. By his conservatory's own count he has recorded more than twenty albums in total.

As a sideman, his most honored credit is on Mirabassi's quartet album Canto Di Ebano (2008, EGEA), which paired his acoustic guitar with Mirabassi's clarinet, Maiore's double bass and Alfred Kramer's drums and won that year's Top Jazz award from Musica Jazz; Alfonsi and Mirabassi have continued to perform together in duo and trio settings for more than ten years since. Other Discogs-documented sideman credits include the Riccardo Luppi Quintet's Ballads & More (2007), Angelo Valori's Notturno Mediterraneo (2009, EGEA), Rita Sannia's Legatura Di Valore (2010), Patrizia Laquidara's Rec Live (2015), a Henry Mancini tribute compilation (2016), a Michele Perruggini session, Disillusion (2023), and appearances on several jazz-compilation and tribute releases, including a 2020 Ennio Morricone tribute.

Alongside the jazz and classical-guitar work, Alfonsi has held the first-guitar chair in the orchestra of Cagliari's opera house, the Teatro Lirico, in productions including Manuel de Falla's La vida breve, Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Verdi's Otello and Falstaff, Donizetti's Don Pasquale, and Astor Piazzolla's Concierto para Bandoneon y orquesta. As an electric-guitar soloist he performed the Italian premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Blood on the Floor, a concerto for jazz trio and orchestra, with the Orchestra dell'Arena di Verona, and he contributed to the score of Silvio Soldini's film Agata e la tempesta. He has taught jazz guitar at the Conservatorio di Parma and currently teaches at the conservatories of Brescia and Verona.

Alfonsi's playing sits at the point where a classical guitarist's technique meets a jazz improviser's vocabulary, and his discography keeps both halves visible rather than blending them into a single style. The two solo-recital albums, the Bach lute suites and the Villa-Lobos program, are straight classical performances that show the training underneath everything else; the Ammentos trio, with accordion, guitar and double bass and no drummer, works as a small chamber ensemble drawing on Mediterranean and popular-song material; and the World Sinfonia years with Al Di Meola put him inside a flamenco-inflected acoustic-guitar duo and ensemble tradition. His own leader albums for EGEA and Abeat favor small, largely acoustic formats built from his own compositions, with Nubìvago carrying an explicit Latin Jazz tag in Discogs' own genre data. Across formats the constant is an acoustic, nylon-or-steel-string guitar sound rather than an electric jazz-guitar tone, reserved mainly for orchestral and theatrical work.