Italian TV Drama and Beyond by Milly Buonanno

Author:Milly Buonanno [Buonanno, Milly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Performing Arts, Television, General, Film
ISBN: 9781841506890
Google: IbqrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Intellect Books
Published: 2012-01-01T02:40:16+00:00

Figure 5.2. Terence Hill as the protagonist parish priest in the investigative series Don Matteo (Raiuno, 2000–present). Courtesy of RAI.

But the most famous regular hero of present-day televisual police drama is unquestionably Il commissario Montalbano/Inspector Montalbano (Raidue and Raiuno, 1999–), a character transferred to the small screen from the best-sellers of the Sicilian novelist Andrea Camilleri. The protagonist’s self-introduction ‘Montalbano here’ (shades of ‘The name’s Bond. James Bond’) has entered into everyday language and into that mode of endorsing genres and characters, which is parody.

Montalbano is a multi-faceted personage, dynamic and pensive, in the small agile body of the actor Luca Zingaretti; a bald yet fascinating police inspector, a lover of food and sensitive to female charm. He does not allow himself to be forced into the mould or style of other regular heroes, just as he shuns the conventional rhetoric of the ‘ordinary everyday hero’; instead, he deploys the all too rare virtues of a man who is intellectually free, an acute and thoughtful observer and an understated natural leader.

Inspector Montalbano is the jewel in the crown of the new run of Italian police dramas, also because its ‘Italianness’ or rather its ‘insularity’ – all the action takes place in a small Sicilian town with the imaginary name of Vigata – has not prevented the series from being exported to a fair number of other countries. The television adaptation makes good use of and heightens the recognizability of a sophisticated yet popular literary figure, earning the brand of a quality TV drama that is enhanced by the sumptuous beauty of its settings. The imaginary Sicilian town of Vigata, sunny and colourful, with its baroque architecture, whitewashed Moorish houses and the translucent expanses of the sea, conveys the true magic of a Mediterranean ‘sense of place’ without degenerating into touristic triteness or folkloric stereotype.

Together with Don Matteo and the archetypical all’italiana police drama Marshal Rocca, Inspector Montalbano forms a trilogy of police dramas with individual protagonists; meanwhile the genre, as we shall soon see, has been veering towards ‘choric protagonism’. The three series are furthermore united by the provincial setting, which, in addition to offering a local background, introduces a peculiar time perspective through scenographic details.

The protagonists of the three series are present-day characters, struggling with a phenomenology of crime that is recognizably inscribed in current events; in fact they live and act in a present that is constantly redolent of and filled with testimonies of the past. It is not the effect of some sort of ‘backwardness’ in the environment or a cloud of nostalgia or the characters’ way of being, although some of their traits may appear to make them men ‘of times past’. It is rather the architecture and landscapes, amply deployed in all three series, that communicate the sense of the past, testify to it, indeed: Gubbio’s monumental square and the Umbrian countryside in its seasonal changes (the seasons still exist) in Don Matteo, the town plan and the architectural remains of the medieval town of

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