We stand before one of Salgari’s most astonishing novels.
The events of Capitan Tempesta are set in 1571 during the Turkish conquest of the island of Cyprus, which until then had been in Venetian hands.
But who is Capitan Tempesta?

He was a remarkably handsome youth, indeed too handsome to be a warrior, somewhat tall, slender, elegantly proportioned, with two pitch-black eyes like glowing carbuncles, the mouth of a maiden with superb little teeth...
all in all, he seemed more a most graceful maiden than a soldier of fortune

.
This very introduction by Salgari brings forth the underlying motif of the novel: the disguise of a splendid Neapolitan noblewoman in search of her betrothed, who has been taken prisoner.
The plot unfolds around the ambiguity of Capitan Tempesta.
A skilled swordsman and valiant combatant, he/she triumphs in duels over the finest opponents, both Christian and Turk, who then fall in love with the courageous maiden.
After fighting in the defense of Famagusta and defeating in single combat one of the most renowned warriors of the Saracen army, the Lion of Damascus, Capitan Tempesta rushes to the castle of Ussif, where her beloved fiancé is held captive.
Through cunning subterfuge, she manages to enter the good graces of the cruel Haradja, who becomes infatuated with the handsome youth, unaware of her true nature.
Capitan Tempesta succeeds in freeing her betrothed and flees by sea, but is overtaken and captured after a typically Salgarian naval battle.
She is freed, however, by the Lion of Damascus, who, hopelessly captivated by the young woman, flees with her to Italy (in the meantime, her beloved fiancé has been murdered).

All the quintessential ingredients of Salgari’s novels are present, yet with something more.
Not only does the narrative skillfully play upon the dual nature of Capitan Tempesta, but the other characters also rebel against the roles to which society seeks to confine them.
Take, for example, the surprising and magnificent figure of Haradja.
Fate would have her relegated to a harem, among the many wives of a pasha.
Yet

I had the blood of a pirate in my veins, and woman though I was, I felt all its savage impulses

.
She could not help but fall in love with warriors, with a passion that, once spurned, turned into ferocious hatred.
Even the opposition between the Christian and Muslim faiths, which at the outset of the book seemed an irreconcilable conflict, gradually tempers as one reads on, because it becomes evident that everyone moves along a ridge where rules and ideologies lose value and substance.
Finally, the character of El-Kadur, Capitan Tempesta’s slave, is magnificent.
Smitten with the maiden himself (

I see you again when, on the sandy beach, you held out dripping seawater before me and rested in the shade of the palms, happy to look upon me

) he suffers terribly because he can never make her his.
This unrequited love, of which Capitan Tempesta is fully aware, and his longing for “the vast, luminous horizons and the sand dunes” overwhelm the man to the verge of madness.

In forms distinct from those of Il Corsaro Nero, where all is gloom and sorrow, here too Salgari operates on a psychoanalytic plane, wherein the characters and events are the iceberg of a subterranean world, forged of fantasies—even erotic ones—and of desires for a different life.

Why read it? To adventure, it adds the complexity of the characters.

Captain Tempest