By Marco Tambara via Wikimedia Commons
We were saddened to hear of the death of Andrea Camilleri, aged 93, one of Italy’s best-loved authors. For so many readers he had brought Sicily to life, capturing the difficult social problems of the island with affection and humour.
In 2014 we posted on this blog a piece to celebrate his Montalbano series. Since then we have continued to acquire further works in the series, the most recent being: Continue reading
Many of us will have been hooked by Luca Zingarelli’s portrayal of Inspector Montalbano in RAI TV’s recent adaptations. Set in Sicily, excellently cast and scripted, these detective stories have been one of the highlights of BBC 4’s foreign language drama series, cleverly broadcast with subtitles rather than dubbed, thus retaining the magic of the original.
Andrea Camilleri, born in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, in 1925, wrote his first in a long series of novels featuring the character of Inspector Montalbano, in 1994. Hugely popular, these novels and short stories, set in Vigata, a thinly disguised version of his birthplace, have captured the public’s imagination and have graduated from being popular bestsellers to being part of the canon of contemporary Italian literature. Continue reading
europeancollections.wordpress.com 