It was during my childhood, for the first time, I came across the Mekong, or rather in his name, I echoed a sound exotic and fascinating, as the toll of a centuries-old bronze bell, a sound that I like feeling in the mouth. if we think only a moment more, I know where this meeting took place. And where could it be, for a child of war, in pre-history, no television and no internet? It could only happen on the books by Emilio Salgari. It was called City of the Leper King and I can still touch buttons on the pages of emotions. The expedition in the jungle, the city dead like all the cities that death hides his secret and maybe his treasure, the magnificent white elephant tusks and long. The memories now are confused - why not Salgari reads, rather than what it holds dear as a reminiscence of his reading - but it seems that here too did peep the majestic Bengal tiger. I owe Salgari the first taste of the Orient. Snapshots taken by the imagination, like, scary, the temple of the goddess Khali. Stranglers and adventurers, fakirs and pirates, explorers and killers. Names of a geography fantastic that over time - I would say with sadness growing - have resulted in the names of real countries: Siam, Burma, Cambodia, Malaysia. several times for Carnival I disguised as a pirate in Malaysia. Was cheap, because you just need an eye patch and a hat on his head. were difficult years, the war was over and we, the street children and the oratory, we felt great and responsible even in the game. There was a shadow of Salgari, which was spread on those days of Carnival. But back to those reading it now makes me more Salgari impression is that he could get me in the places he wrote about, even as it had no ever set foot. My friend Paul says in his book, The Eyes of Salgari, in which he narrated firms a scientist-traveler from Florence, Edward Beccari, a man who has explored the length and breadth of the forests of Malaysia and the islands of the South Seas, making friends with the headhunters of Borneo or the cannibals of New Guinea. Salgari, on the contrary, those places did not see them ever, at most once he embarked on a sailing on the Adriatic from which he returned exhausted by seasickness and determined to keep our feet firmly on the ground for the rest of his life. He called "sea captain" Salgari, but it was only a fantasy or a surge of pride. Similarly turning to cycling with a turban from Verona maharajah or invented to hunt tiger in the hills of Turin to the use and consumption of their children. But Salgari told - and so nice to us all - the world Beccari had seen with his eyes. Eyes, explains Paul, who were indispensable for a kid like me would find itself in our hands but also true that the fantasy world in which unfold the story of Sandokan, Yanez, or James Brooke. Salgari Today when I think I imagine it nailed in his modest home, while dipping the nib in the ink bottle, with an atlas in front and opened a new adventure in my head. I see him struggling with a pile of old books that tell of distant lands and peoples, chronicles and travel accounts unearthed in public libraries, volumes of paper yellowed and torn, held together by bindings worn by time. was a forced labor Salgari (I call it Emily?), A man who has gone through countless sufferings and humiliations of daily life that have not made a mixed some adventure. Provided that adventure was not also fulfill contractual obligations with its tremendous publishers, just to make ends meet. C dare he wrote in 1909, his friend the painter Leg: The profession of the writer should be full of moral and material satisfaction. But I am stuck at my desk for many hours a day and night and when some of the rest are in the library to read. I must write to all folders and folders on steam now send to publishers without having had time to review and correct. " Already, the contracts forced him to write three books every year. Let's say in a thousand pages in all fair copy. Three pages every day and if you wanted to rest on a Sunday, or if one day he was taken by the fever, the day was six pages to write. More work towards a period of travel, plus short stories. To help one hundred cigarettes a day. And a bottle of Marsala wine drinking from morning to evening. After that he committed suicide - by choosing the terrible end of a samurai of another age - was found a letter in which he accused his publishers to have condemned to misery and asked them to give something back for his funeral and for the His poor family. Torti forgotten now. Emilio and I think I'll be back to watch the showdown that his life was not too different from that of Edward, the scientist who is haunting unexplored continents and countries. Beccari, the passenger in the flesh, the man moved restlessness, the desire to know peoples and continents, the desire to touch. Salgari, the traveler's fantasy, man that the adventure does not have a physical space, but the vast horizons that a mind, well fed by just reading, we can offer. Which one has gone farther? ". To this question I can not answer. I just know in my life I have heard one another. I was with Edward and Emily that goes hand in hand, including a chat and a gesture of astonishment.
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