Emilio Salgari

Emilio Salgari was born on 21 August 1862 in Verona to a family of modest merchants. From a young age, he had the desire to explore the seas and studied seamanship at a nautical technical institution in Venice, but his academic performance was too poor, and he never graduated.

He was an Italian writer of action adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction. In Italy, his extensive body of work was more widely read than that of Dante Alighieri. Today he is still among the 40 most translated Italian authors. Many of his most popular novels have been adapted as comics, animated series, and feature films. He is considered the father of Italian adventure fiction and Italian pop culture, and the “grandfather” of the Spaghetti Western.