English

Noun

salto mortale ‎(plural salti mortali)

1. A dangerous and daring jump with possibly lethal outcome.
2. (figuratively) A risky, dangerous or crucial step or undertaking.
   • 1867 July, William Dean Howells, “At Padua” in The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics, volume XX, № CXVII, chapter i, page 25/1:

     I take shame to myself…for having been more taken by the salti mortali* of a waiter who summed up my account at a Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has been many times captured and recaptured.
     * Salti mortali are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the product of two and two.

   • 1919, Boris Sidis, The Source and Aim of Human Progress:

     The frenzied, suggestible, gregarious, subconscious self, freed from all rational restraints, celebrated its delirious orgies, its corybantic bacchanalia, held its mad salto mortale over the grave of crucified humanity.

Translations

References

• “salto mortale”, in OED Online, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.