The writer disappeared at the age of 94 in the city where he was born. A prolific and multifaceted author, Gianni Rodari considered him the heir to the creator of Sandokan
He imagined paradise like going to the mountains: All day up and down the Dolomites. On those peaks Mino Milani, who died on Thursday 10 February in his Pavia, arrived lightly, leaving a backpack loaded with almost 200 books – for children, historical, biographical – written after being struck by Joseph Conrad. Up to the end, work was his religion: The will to live may or may not exist, but work is. A sacred thing for me, he had said at the Children’s Book Fair in 2017 when writers, editors, readers had gathered to celebrate the 90th birthday of the undisputed king of adventure. The word comes from the Latin adventura – he had explained on that occasion — that is
I look for the things to come. In the monumental biography in images edited by Giovanni Giovannetti and Luisa Voltan and published by Effigie in 2018 he explained it as follows: is it possible to be born between two world wars and live without adventure? I did not seek them, of course: rather it was they who sought me.
Guglielmo Mino Milani, also known by various pseudonyms such as Stelio Martelli, Eugenio Ventura, Piero Selva, Mungo Graham Alcesti and T. Maggio, he was born on February 3, 1928 in Paviaa city whose history, anecdotes and memories that were the background to the nineteenth-century investigations by Commissioner Melchiorre Ferrari of the Imperial Austrian police, and to the monumental Adventurous history of Pavia.
The twentieth century had crossed it at a marching pace, starting, in 1953, to work on Il Corriere dei Piccoli, which later became Corriere dei Ragazzi. In 1958 the director Giovanni Mosca commissioned him to write a series of short stories about the West and him invents Tommy River, a melancholy cowboy from Kentucky who fights good battles almost never victorious.
Milani was also been the ingenious narrator of fictional reality, the title of a very popular column on Domenica del Corriere, short stories of real events that had something curious, incredible but also true. Great lover of Giuseppe Garibaldi to whom he has dedicated a biography, he has collaborated with the greats of comics, from Mario Uggeri to Hugo Pratt, from Dino Battaglia to Sergio Toppi without disdaining the romantic genre, such as Phantom of loveset in his foggy city, which later became a Dino Risi film with Romy Schneider and Marcello Mastroianni.
He modestly defined himself as a narrator: When I hear the word writer I think of Stendhal, Flaubert, Dickens. Gianni Rodari considered him the heir of Emilio Salgari and, like the inventor of Sandokan, Milani populace of sailors, samurai, princesses, revolutionaries, gladiators, cowboys, Greek heroes and novels written in the studio full of memories, objects (including a cannonball fired at Pavia by French troops on 2 August 1656), relics of the Risorgimento of which he was an expert.
He had always lived where he was born, at the Milani house, the early twentieth century building in front of the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’oro where he cooked his famous blueberry risotto for guests. There a week ago she celebrated her birthday, with relatives and the beloved cat Sibilla. His routine was precise, governed by an almost military discipline: he worked five hours a day (I wrote with the pen, the ballpoint pen, the typewriter, the computer said) starting at 8.30 in the morning and stopping at noon for the unmissable Dry martini without ice.
Vital and combative, Milani lived on lights and shadows: in 1986 he shot himself in the heart with his .38, survived thanks to a sternum bone that you owe the blow. He called himself a pessimist, but he lived to the full by living with regrets. He admitted it in the volume The author talks about himself published by Franco Angeli in 2009: It will be because all in all it went well for me, but I don’t like those who long for lost youth and regret its hopes, or even they call them illusions. Never had any illusions, it seems to me.
February 10, 2022 (change February 11, 2022 | 11:39)
© Time.News