Andrea Camilleri was not only “the father” of Commissioner Montalbano, his life and his work tell almost a century of Italian history, intertwining theater, television, literature, civil commitment and an unmistakable language that mixes Italian to the Sicilian dialect. Born in Sicily on 6 September 1925 and died in Rome on 17 July 2019, at the age of 93, he is buried in the Acatholic cemetery of Testaccio. His inheritance is not only literary: in his books he has been able to intertwine historical memory, irony and civil commitment, telling “minimal cases” of Sicily and Italy with a look that today still speaks to the present. More than the creator of Montalbano, TV series born in the late 90s and broadcast on Rai 1, Camilleri was a universal narrator: a man who transformed the language and Sicilian tradition into a lens with which to observe modernity.
The birth of Andrea Camilleri and youth: from Porto Empedocle to Rome
Born in Porto Empedocle on September 6, 1925, in a wealthy family but destined to downsize after the war, Camilleri grew a few kilometers from where Luigi Pirandello was born, his distant relative. The Sicily of his childhood was marked by the bombings and the allied landing of 1943: traumatic experiences that left a sign in his training. Since he was a boy he showed a rebellious and intolerant character to the authority: he even came to falsify the report card and to be expelled from the religious college in which his parents had sent him. But in that period his great passions were also born: the sea, the adventure novels and the first attempts of writing. He published poems and stories already in the 1940s, with the encouragement of figures such as Ungaretti and Quasimodo.
In 1948 he moved to Rome to attend the director’s course at the National Academy of Dramatic Art. From there he began a long career as a theatrical director and above all in Rai, where between 1958 and 1988 he signed countless regions and radio and television scripts.
In those years Camilleri became an established show man, he taught in prestigious institutions such as the Experimental Center of Cinematography and the Academy and experienced a style that would also influence his fiction: theatrical dialogues, a close rhythm, the ability to mix different registers.
Literary debuts and late success
The desire to tell stories “with their own words” brought him, between the 60s and 70s to write the first novels. “The course of things” (1967-68, published in 1978) and “A thread of smoke” (1980) already show its interest in Sicilian history and its taste for the ironic and grotesque plot. But the great success came only in mature age, with “The Hunting Season” (1992) and above all with “The shape of the water” (1994), The book that gave birth to Commissioner Montalbano. However, reducing Camilleri to Montalbano would however be unfair. Prolific writer (more than 100 books, over 10 million copies sold), also cooked with historical novels such as “Il Birraio di Preston” (1995), “The concession of the telephone” (1998) or “The king of Girgenti” (2001), and with civil and wise works that reflect his political passion and his civil commitment.
His writing, which he himself called “artisan”, merged comedy, grotesque and an invented language, the “Vigatese”, capable of making a deeply local Sicily universal.
Andrea Camilleri and Montalbano: a very Italian hero
Commissioner Salvo Montalbano, protagonist of novels and stories set in the imaginary Vigàta, embodies an Italy made of contradictions. Just but impatient of the rules, ironic, rooted in his land, soon becomes a family character to millions of readers. The series explodes thanks to the television success with Luca Zingaretti and conquers the world, translated into over 120 languages.
Camilleri himself said that:
The first Montalbano was written “by discipline”, the second “for dissatisfaction” and the third “for money”.
But the series, continued for over twenty years, has returned an ironic and realistic portrait of contemporary Italian society.
Acknowledgments and legacy
Camilleri received numerous honors: among the most important, the Chianti literary prize (1997), the Vittorio De Sica Prize (2003), the medal of great officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2003) and various degrees Honoris causeincluding that of the University of Cagliari in 2013. In 2017, even an asteroid was baptized with its name: 204816 AndreacoCamilleri.
He defined himself as “an Italian writer born in Sicily”, and it is from there that he knew how to speak to the whole world. Since 1999 his works have also entered the prestigious series of the Mondadori meridians, consecrating him as “contemporary classic”.
