Emilio Salgari, the father of Sandokan

 

Salgari, the father of Sandokan, the Tigers of Mompracem, and more or less all corsairs, daughters of corsairs, and more generally pirates of Malaysia, had become famous not only for his undeniable talent but also for his extremely fertile imagination, which led him to describe exotic places like the seas of Southeast Asia and the warm waters of the Caribbean (where if you escaped a boarding, you certainly couldn't overcome the sharks).

He wrote and described. He spoke of archipelagos, forests, and ravenous beasts. He narrated deadly daggers with serpentine blades and agile, swift prahos with enormous sails and brave sailors on board. He had described all these places, weapons, and vessels without ever having been to those parts, or even remotely in the vicinity.

The writer, who had never moved from Verona first and then Turin, drew from maps and texts he found at the civic library in the Piedmontese capital. In doing so, he managed to imagine the humid and warm locations of equatorial zones, perceiving their smells, dangers, and the soft buzzing of the Anopheles mosquito, the one that transmits malaria, just to be clear.

In short, Salgari was a genius.

I wondered what he would have been able to do if only he had today's technologies at his disposal. By typing the name, he would have reached the desired location. He would have seen it appear on the satellite photo, then glide over the pattern of its streets at the desired speed and begin to discern terraces, swimming pools, and the arrangement of gardens and large plants. Shifting his gaze slightly, he would have seen the foamy wake of boats traveling across a green and unruffled sea. He would have identified the shadows of buildings projected onto sidewalks, the roofs of cars in motion, and a strange-shaped construction surrounded by a geometrically impeccable hedge frame.

Certainly, he wouldn't have been satisfied.

He would have acted on the mouse wheel until he remained intrigued by the blue roof of a large building. At that point, with a click, the orange little man, patiently waiting on the right side of the screen, would have glided to the ground in the magic of an interactive panoramic photo. From the start, he would have begun to explore the area, looking up like any tourist and, why not, careful to protect his precious wallet from the attack of some ill-intentioned person.

With eyes strained from the white glare of the road, he would have observed a double row of palm trees that disappeared only in the hazy horizon in the distance. That blue-roofed building (the one that had intrigued him before) would have revealed its architecture: a rather bizarre mixture between the White House in Washington and the residence of the Raja (excellent, he would have told himself, to set the love story between the noble English woman he had in mind and the bandit of the archipelago, the one he imagined with long black hair and a band around his forehead). Its two small domes, symmetrical on the sides, would have presented their curved surface painted in a bright blue, on par with the pillars that seemed to support it, harmonized with walls topped by a long marble parapet and in contrast with the milky streaks of the sky.

Of course, the white economy car parked a few meters from the entrance along with the delivery truck with its bed still open could not have been compatible with stories of pirates, Labuan pearls, and sea raids, but that wouldn't have mattered. It would have been sufficient to ignore their existence. Even that traffic divider, carelessly painted with an alternation of tire-contaminated white and faded black, would have disappeared from the drafts of his novels to make way for the uncertain edges of dirt roads.

On the right, next to the palm trees tamed by the wind and a garden of succulents, also oriented in the direction that the trade winds had established for them, he would have seen flowers put to the test by the severity of the sun. They preceded a large meadow with tall grass, dotted in the distance by wild horses, some intent on grazing, others running, drawing elegant trajectories. Well, perhaps he would have invented the horses and, in fact, would have put on the other side fishermen protected from the sun with wide-brimmed hats, sweaty and bent over the hulls of their boats that had just landed in port. He would have wanted some to rearrange the nets, some to unload the catch. The last ones, older and more cunning, he would have seen them well serving impatient customers on the pier.

A little further, he would have noticed a dense weave of houses, all facing the sea and all painted in vivid colors: from red to heavy yellow, to the omnipresent sky blue. The man with the scooter and an improbable aluminum coat rack, arranged as best as possible between his legs, would have become a merchant on horseback with a pair of wicker baskets arranged on its back. In one hand a whip and in the other a rope, ready to secure the animal to the balustrade of the next inn. The tram full of passengers would have been promoted to a carriage with six trains, and the line of employees at the supermarket checkout would have evolved into a platoon of mercenaries, infallible shooters, and well-trained fighters, loyal and under the orders of Lord James Brooke.

But what difference would it have made in the end?

None, Emilio Salgari would have left his mark anyway, but perhaps he would have done it faster, without queuing in the anteroom of a dusty library and without reviving the mites of an ancient map, rolled up on itself for who knows how many years.

Dreaming and fantasizing is a divine gift. Traveling, experiencing places, and noting sensations in a notebook always at hand is even better, but not everyone can afford it. So, I would say, there's really nothing wrong with helping yourself with Street View...