ITALICA • Volume 92 • No. 3 • Fall 2015 625 Again at the Walls of Famagusta. Emilio Salgari versus Wu Ming: Reshaping a Historical Event MiMMo Cangiano Duke University Abstract: The siege of Famagusta, as examined in the novels Capitan Tempesta (1905) by Emilio Salgari and Altai (2009) by the Wu Ming collective, is here used as a benchmark not to evaluate the respective authors’ ideological perspectives (bound to be diferent given the interval between publishing dates) but to relect on the added complication brought about by the new type of historical novel, a complication that is inherent in a diferent perspective toward the novel form. The issues set forth in Altai undermine the steadfast structure of the historical narrative that has accompanied “Famagusta,” demolishing not only the ideological corollaries of colonial signiicance (widespread in Salgari) but also those that aim to obscure the function of money as capital and, at the same time, the inevitable conlict between classes. Keywords: Salgari, Wu Ming, Famagusta, Capitan Tempesta, Altai, allegory. Dicono che non urlò. Mentono. Wu Ming I. The silence of Bragadin T he epigraph quoted above appears in the 2009 novel Altai, written by the Wu Ming collective. It refers to the tortures suffered by Captain Marcantonio Bragadin, who led the resistance of the Venetian outpost of Famagusta against the Ottoman siege. Famagusta was conquered in August 1571 (only two months before the Battle of Lepanto) and Bragadin encountered a horrid death at the hands of the Turks. Wu Ming’s blunt pronouncement shatters the genealogical perspective that linked the siege of Famagusta with the battle of Lepanto. The myth of Bragadin gave weight to a historical tradition aimed, on the one hand, at providing Christianity with another martyr, and on the other, at preparing the glorious account of events that would see the Holy League triumphant in the waters of the Mediterranean. Famagusta, of course, is not Lepanto; from a historical point of view, it lacks the latter’s critical fortune and does not, obviously, serve the same purposes. While Lepanto stands for a glorious battle in which the