Romero Salgari, the last descendant who bore the surname of the great writer, has died. With him closes the tragic story of a family, strewn with suicides and follies, which began in the Victorian splendor of the Belle Époque with the great and irresistible passion that had bound together a penniless brilliant novelist, inventor of the characters of Sandokan and the Black Corsair, and Ida Peruzzi, some successful actress who had decided to leave the scene for love. They had fathered 4 children with exotic names (Fatima, Omar, Nadir, Romero) and on free Sundays they all went for walks together with a picnic basket in hand on the hills above the house where they lived in Turin, like a happy family, before the madness of her made him a prisoner of a noose contract and desperate days, all consumed to prevent Ida from ending up in a mental hospital.
Emilio Salgari killed himself on 25 April 1911, one sunny morning: he left his house in Corso Casale 205 after saying goodbye to his children, went up to the Madonna del Pilone and from there cut through the meadows up to an impervious clearing shielded by trees and from shrubs, stopping at the edge of a crevasse. With a razor he slashed his body and cut his throat, then fell into the ravine. He had left three letters. One to his publishers, «to you who got rich on my skin. I greet you by breaking the pen». And the others to his children, explaining that their mother’s madness had drained all his energy and consumed his heart. With him no longer to protect her, the doctor decided to hospitalize her in a mental hospital for Ida. She had loved Emilio to the point of her madness and he had loved her to the point of her death.
At the crossroads of life, fate had now taken the wrong path. Ida spent the rest of her years in a mental hospital and only came out in 1922 the day before her death, a sunny Sunday like the ones they spent sitting on the lawns having a picnic looking at Turin spread out under the hills. The last clinical report is dated May 29, 1922: the sick woman is very sad and she is suffering from a carcinoma. A few years before her, in 1914, she had lost her eldest daughter, Fatima, killed at the age of just 24 by tuberculosis. Her pain had bent her even further along with the memories of her. It’s not right for a great love to end like this, she had told her husband about her when he had tried for the first time to take his own life with a sword. At night, before falling asleep, she asked him to tell how it all began. Emilio had seen her at the theater and had been struck by her: he penned love letters like a Malaysian pirate, saying that she was her heroine. “I remember we were huddled together, panting, feverish, both delirious with love,” he too wrote to her in the last few days to recall their first time. After Ida’s death, this tragic story seems to never stop. Another son, Romero, ends up committing suicide like his father, in 1931, after trying to murder his wife, his son Mimmo and his brother-in-law. Nadir dies in a motorcycle accident in 1957. And the last surviving son, Omar, also takes his own life in 1963.
Mimmo, who miraculously survived his parent’s madness, finally has a normal life, gets married and moves to the town of Roero. He has two children: Romero junior and Patrizia. But the curse doesn’t seem to be over yet: in 1984, when he was 24, the young Romero ends up in the news pages for the murder of a retired postwoman, Lucia Valsania. It is an absurd crime, after which he too attempts suicide. He is recognized as mentally ill and interned for a few years. Then he returns to live in Montà d’Alba, Cuneo, together with his mother. With his sister, who passed away in 2008 for an incurable disease, he is dedicated to keeping the memory of his great-grandfather alive. In the farewell letter left to his children, Emilio Salgari had written: “I hope that the millions of admirers and readers I have around the world will be able to assure you a future”. It didn’t happen that way. But nothing went as it should in the story of this brilliant writer. An unfair vote. To kill himself, he had retraced the same walks he used to take as he sought inspiration and dreamed of distant seas he had never seen. “Writing is traveling without the hassle of luggage,” he said. And he even wrote three books a year, working day and night, to fulfill lump sum contracts that paid him like a civil servant even though his novels sold very well. He was a mild man, loved by readers of all kinds, even in correspondence with Queen Margherita who appreciated his production, but none of this was recognized to him. He told the family doctor, Arminio Herr, that he didn’t have the money to have his wife hospitalized in a clinic and not in an asylum where the poor end up and so she had to stay with him. The tragedy of her family thus began, when the laundress Luigia Qurico, shielding her eyes from the sun’s rays, saw that lifeless body at the bottom of the ravine.