The young Salgari stage reporter, the theater as a laboratory of adventure

Salgari’s youthful chronicles reveal a very attentive observer. He doesn’t just judge singers or actors: he analyzes postures, stage movement, scenography, even the work of the stagehands. In his articles dedicated to the Veronese stages – from the Philharmonic Theater to the New Theater, up to the Ristori Theater and the popular spaces of the city Diurno. – the visual precision that will become the stylistic feature of his adventure novels is already emerging. His critical writing, often vibrant and polemical, reveals an author immersed in the culture of Scapigliatura, but already projected towards a more dynamic and popular narrative form. It is no coincidence that melodrama, with its emotional exasperation and its theatricality, becomes a true expressive training ground for him.

The clash with the critic Ugo Capetti, a key figure in the Veronese cultural panorama of the time and uncle of the theater critic Renato Simoni, also fits into this context. The controversy, which arose around the interpretation of stage music and theatrical acting, reveals a Salgari already aware of his own idea of ​​art: an art that must involve, excite, enthrall. His words, reported in the volume, are emblematic: theater cannot be reduced to convention or artifice, but must become a living experience, capable of acting on the spectator’s imagination. It is a conception that anticipates the narrative force of his future novels. No less significant is the fact that Salgari did not find space in magazines such as “La Ronda”, the most ambitious of the Veronese ones, a sign of a tension between official culture and popular writing that would accompany him for a long time.

Salgari’s training is deeply rooted in his hometown, Verona. Son of Luigi Salgari and Luigia Gradara, after a brief stint at the Nautical Institute of Venice, the young writer returned to the city in 1882, entering the heart of local cultural and journalistic life. He collaborates with “La Nuova Arena” under the direction of Ruggero Giannelli, writing articles on international politics, sports news and narrative texts. In recent years he also tried his hand at appendix fiction, quickly publishing works that anticipated the exotic and adventurous themes of his mature production.

At the same time, Salgari experiences a season of intense physical and social activity: he is a cyclist, founder of the Circolo Velocipedistico, fencer and gymnast of the Bentegodi Gymnastics Society. A vitality that seems to be reflected in his writing, always tense, dynamic, visual. In 1885 he moved to “L’Arena”, where he continued to write until 1893, before moving to Turin. Here he definitively establishes himself as a narrator, but without ever severing the link with that youthful period in which his gaze on the theater had already defined his style. It is precisely this continuity between news and invention that emerges forcefully in the volume edited by Claudio Gallo and Lorenzo Bassotto: the theater as the matrix of Salgarian imagination, as a space in which reality is transformed into story.

A particularly lively chapter is dedicated to Ida Aida Peruzzi, an actress whom Salgari followed carefully in her interpretations. The reviews dedicated to her are not simple critical reports, but true narrative portraits, in which a personal and sentimental dimension also emerges, so much so that in the end he decided to marry her. Peruzzi, an actress with a varied repertoire – from Carlo Goldoni to William Shakespeare – represents for the young Salgari a privileged observation point on the theatrical world, but also a presence that contributes to the construction of his imagination. The value of the volume “On the Scenes” lies precisely in this: restoring a still partly unknown author, immersed in the cultural life of his city and still far from the canonical figure of the adventure novelist. What emerges is a more concrete, more “physical” Salgari, an observer of stage reality even before being an inventor of distant worlds. An author who, between the stages of Verona and the editorial offices of newspapers, builds the foundations of his own poetics. A Salgari, in short, born not only from the imagination, but from the attentive gaze of a young reporter who learned to write by watching the theater live. (by Paolo Martini)