“I wasexaggerated physiological tism. Ideal love is strong ». The woman described by the doctors, but also judged for her passion, is Ida Peruzzi, wife of Emilio Salgari, hospitalized in the asylum in via Giulio and then transferred to Collegno.
Born in Verona just like the novelist, she embarked on a career as an actress at a very young age. In addition to the adventure books so beloved that he still finds new television transpositions today, such as the one dedicated to Sandokan which will be shot in the summer, he publishes theatrical reviews in the newspaper “L’Arena”: and it seems that just a show knows Aida, as he will call her all his life, and you are fascinated by her. He woos her, writes her burning letters. The two married in 1892, she was 24, he was 29. The actress leaves her job to devote herself to her family: four children are born from the love with Salgari.
To weigh on the couple, who moves to Turin, Genoa and Turin again, economic problems: literary success does not correspond to the same amount of earnings. The tension mounts. Salgari’s biographies often refer to phases of the man’s depression, but it is she, Ida, who ends up admitted to the psychiatric hospital on April 19, 1911. The next day, the writer writes to his editor: he begs to receive as much as possible. soon 600 lire, promising to send “another hundred folders” within a few days. The sum does not arrive in time. Salgari takes his own life on the 25th of the month.
Only “La Stampa” the following day gives news of his death and launches a subscription to help the children, entrusted to relatives who lived in Turin; two great names of the time respond to the request for help, the writer and poet Amalia Guglielminetti and the composer Giacomo Puccini Ida Peruzzi learns of her husband’s suicide in the asylum from which she will not leave never. It is one of the dramatic events told in «Women and madness in Piedmont. Stories and images of female lives locked up in asylums “(Susalibri), on newsstands with” La Stampa “, the work of the writer and essayist Bruna Bertolo, author of numerous publications on the history of women, with the premise of Alberto Sinigaglia, and the final chapter of psychiatrist Pier Maria Furlan. «It was not easy to write the book – comments the author -. The research, carried out mostly in the impressive archive of the former Collegno asylum, was accompanied by intense emotion as the stories emerged from the medical records devoured by dust ».
If that of Ida Peruzzi is the story best known for her husband’s fame, most of the others are about forgotten women, Bertolo points out, not only from society but often from families themselves. «They were women removed from the” world of the living “usually for problems that had little to do with mental illness: they had rebelled against the humiliations suffered in the family, or they had shouted their no to the beatings of their husbands or to continuous pregnancies. Women with food shortages, peasants accused of being “masculine”, girls with habits considered easy, mothers with suicidal tendencies after the death of children and loved ones in war. Hidden lives dbehind the bars “. —
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