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Andrea Camilleri, who died in Rome at 93 last month, often grumbled that he was being monstered by the success of his great creation, Commissario Salvo Montalbano, top cop in the not-quite fictitious port of Vigata in Sicily.
In twenty-seven novellas and a clutch of short stories, and as many films for television, Montalbano has become one of the great detectives of world literature. His fame can match that of Sherlock Homes, who also came to annoy his creator with his fame, and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.
The films are a brilliant collaboration of author and actors in beautifully theatrical tragi-comic scenarios in which plot often seems hardly to matter. Equal star billing must go to the setting, not only the vistas of Sicily old and new – and especially in the baroque architecture of Ragusa and Syracuse – but in the references to Sicilian tradition, language and culture, good and bad.
Camilleri and Montalbano have done more for the image of Sicily than any other two individuals in the past century and more. Because of the books and films, the landscape, the food and wine, they have brought new visitors by the million. Tourism increased in Syracuse and Ragusa by forty per cent in the two years following the release of the first two films, The Shape of Water, and The Terracotta Dog.
“It has had a huge effect,” I was told by Alessandro, manager of L’Eremo a hotel in a converted monastery just south of Ragusa. Room 11 in his hotel was the setting of one of the first murders in the series – and is itself a point of pilgrimage. “The quality of tourism, the food and produce have all benefited and the new local wines aren’t bad either. You may remember Vittoria just a few miles from here from your travels in the sixties. It was pretty much a dump then – now it has two of the best restaurants around.” Vittoria with its grand Baroque main piazza and facades is a favourite Montalbano location.
It began almost by accident. Andrea Camilleri was in his mid-sixties when he retired from a successful career as a film and theatre director, and professor in cinema and acting at a leading drama academy. He had a stab at writing historical novels, one winning a prize, but gave up. In 1994 Montalbano emerged from the shadows with The Shape of Water, which became an instant hit. At one point Camilleri was to have the top six places in the Italian fiction bestsellers list.
He had invented his cop hero for stories to tell his aged and dying father. Eventually he took the name from Manuel Vazquez Montalban, a Catalan detective writer whose hero Pepe Carvalho shared an obsessive taste for good food with the future Salvo Montalbano. Camilleri told his father he couldn’t write straightforward cop stories in Italian, so invented an ingenious amalgam of Sicilian dialect and Italian which pepper both the narrative and dialogue the books and films.
The majority of the characters in the twenty-six television dramas are Sicilian. The production team lead by the director Alberto Sironi and the actors led by Luca Zingaretti, who plays Montalbano, comb the clubs, theatres of drama schools for supporting actors. Outstanding are Marcello Perracchio, the grumpy and creatively foul-mouthed pathologist Dottor Pasquano, and Angelo Russo, another son of Ragusa, who plays the clownish but kindly Agent Catarella; on set and in real life he speaks almost incomprehensible dialect.
Salvo makes an inauspicious entrance on the world stage – as soft as the entrance of Jeeves into Bertie Wooster’s domain – at the close of the first chapter of The Shape of Water. Two beachcombers have discovered a body in an abandoned car. They don’t want to report to the Carabinieri station because it is commanded by a Milanese. “The Vigata police inspector, on the other hand, was from Catania, a certain Salvo Montalbano, who, when he wanted to get to the bottom of something, he did.”
Salvo Montalbano has his own take on justice and truth. He is a bit of a loner, in perpetual motion collision with those in authority above and around him. Camilleri soon began to use the novels to attack politicians, corrupt functionaries and judges. Till recently the billionaire prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was a favourite target. This year he attacked the draconian policies and brutal practices towards migrants and refugees of the Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini of the League, who he compared to Mussolini for “the same Fascist arrogance, the same mug representation of power.”
Luca Zingaretti handles the subtleties of Camilleri’s Montalbano, and then adds some. He was a star pupil in the acting academy, and has a crucial part in shaping the drama and staging along with director Alberto Sironi. Round him is a circus of fedelissimi, his deputy Inspector Mimi Augello, an inveterate donnaiuolo (skirt chaser) played by Cesare Bocci and their younger sidekick Inspector Giuseppe Fazio, portrayed by the timeless Peppino Mazzotta, who once ran his own acting company in Calabria.
Frequently Camilleri himself has been present for the shooting. The company decamps to Ragusa for months, scoping locations and auditioning local actors. He has also helped with the scripts of the spin-offs of Young Montalbano, twelve episodes which began in 2012 with Michele Riondino in the title role.
The original twenty-seven novellas – one is yet to come – are written to a tight formula: eighteen chapters of ten pages each. The touch of genius, says Cesare Bocci, who plays Inspector Augello, “is in the dialogue. The books are like scripts – the chat in Sicilian and Italian come straight off the page – they don’t need touching when we come to the filming.”
The other touch of genius is the setting of old and new Sicily, mostly old Sicily – baroque palaces and squares, the occasional classical and medieval ruin; some intense exchange taking place on the ancient colonnade at Selinunte and the Greek temples of Agrigento. Today there are special tours to the Montalbano sites at Scicli, Modica, and Noto. You can stay at Montalbano’s apartment on the coast on the Lido di Ragusa at Punto Secco and even seek out his favorite gastronomic haunt, Da Enzo at Vigata. A few years back Camilleri’s birthplace Porto Empedocle changed its name to Porto Empedocle – Vigata, by mayoral decree; the road sign is there to prove it.
The squares and balconies are deliberately set up with an air of unreality – almost a fantasy theatre set. “There are no parked cars, and road signs – it is all to drive the drama and focus on the characters,” according to Luca Zingaretti.
Towns like Noto, Ragusa, Scicli and Modica are more than worth a visit. Huge efforts have been made to restore the fabric of dozens of sites. I would recommend particularly Palazzolo Acreide, not frequently visited by Montalbano and his team. It is a jewel on a high escarpment—across the ravine a miniature Baroque basilica seems to have been slipped by shoehorn into a chink in the granite cliffs.
Equally special are the Sicilian actors and extras. They speak the language with a peculiar dry directness, both men and women. Among the finest cameos are the encounters between Montalbano and the old patriarch of the Sinagra, one of the two local Mafia clans – in which there is a strange blur between fact and fiction. Balduccio Sinagra, brilliantly played by Francesco Sineri an old stage professional, summons Montalbano to an audience to request protection for his grandson. In the simple grandeur of the terrace at the Donnafugata Palace (as in The Leopard) he explains what it is to be “A Man of Honour.” “A line has to be drawn,” says the ancient capo, “an agreement between men who must be men, but if they cross the line they become beasts of the field.” Montalbano nods, says he has learned two things, then walks away.
Another glorious and rather late addition to both television series is the singing and occasional presence of Olivia Sellerio – whose deep throaty rendition of folk songs open and close each episode of Young Montalbano. She is now a star in her own right, as is the publishing house – Sellerio editore Palermo – she and her brother inherited from her parents Elvira and Enzo. Sellerio remains the Montalbano publisher, selling millions of copies.
Alongside Camilleri, Sellerio publishes novels by Gianrico Carofiglio and Maurizio de Giovanni. Both have married complicated police and lawyer protagonists with complicated lives with razor-sharp approaches to power, truth and justice. Both are translated into English, and well translated. Matching them with the Montalbano tales, it is apparent they are more than poliziotteschi crime-action dramas. There is something of the Gary Cooper at High Noon about Salvo Montalbano and his confreres Pietro Fenoglio of Carofiglio’s Bari, and Commissario Ricciardi in De Giovanni’s brilliant depiction of fascist Naples. They are cops who read and think, familiar with the works of Dante and Pirandello.
Camilleri himself was sensitive to the charge that he was buonista – a goody-goody always allowing the good guys to win – to the end. He rarely allows the Mafia to take centre stage – although the wars of the Sinagra and the Cuffaro provide a noisy background musak of gunfire and vendetta in almost every story.
Like his great friend and mentor Leonardo Sciascia, Camilleri knows it – La Cosa, the thing – is always there. “From the day of my birth,” Leonardo Sciascia told me a few months before he died, “Mafia was part of the air I breathed. It was always for the bad – una cosa da delinquere.”
Camilleri has taken steps to remedy the buonista charge. He has left a book with Sellerio, not be released until after his death. Later this year we are due The Cook of the Halcyon. Either then or in a subsequent short story, Salvo meets his end – no reprieve, no Reichenbach Falls recovery. “Sherlock Holmes was retrieved, Camilleri told an interviewer in 2012, but not Montalbano. In that last book he’s really finished.”
The relationship was getting testy. With an elegant touch of magic realism, Camilleri gets to the point in a very short story, Montalbano Refuses. The detective has pursued two young rapists. After murdering their victim, they propose roasting her eyes – but before they can act, the detective phones the author. He says he hates the story, and he resigns – “this isn’t my thing and you have made a stronzata of it.”
The author tries to excuse himself because critics say he is buonista with sugary tales, and only with an eye on royalties. He says he has to get modern and “spreading so much blood on paper doesn’t harm anyone.”
Salvo stands his ground. “For me Salvo Montalbano is this story’s cosi, and not that. Mr Boss (Padronissimo), you talk of writing differently: well then go and invent another protagonist. Do I make myself clear?”
“Very clear. But then how do I finish this story?”
“Like this,” says the Commissario.
And he hangs up.
The world will not hang up on Salvo Montalbano and his creator – twin immortals like Marlowe and Chandler, Holmes and Conan Doyle.
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