Corsairs, sultans and bajaderas populate a wild stretch of the Po River bank in Turin. A pirate ship floats on the river. A man calls in vain for help from those characters: his interlocutors are inert, floppy silhouettes of colored cardboard. It is yet another theater, the last, for Italy's greatest adventure storyteller. That secret corner of the Po he has set up himself with the complicity of his wife Ida. Now, however, a double reckoning looms over him, the exhaustion of his creativity and the realization that he has destroyed his wife's life, perhaps even infecting her with an unmentionable disease. Ida was admitted to the asylum the day before. The only human being to whom he can confess is a civic guard who has come down to the river to persuade him to unload his abusive theater. But in turn the guard will turn out to be nothing more than a cardboard cutout. The next morning, Salgari goes up into a hillside forest armed with a razor and kills himself.