My last foreign blog was about Sicily. So is this one, but it’s one with a difference. It involves the late Sicilian author, Andrea Camilleri, about whom I have also blogged, in slightly different contexts, in a couple of previous fiction blogs. Anyhow, enough preamble. I shall get on with the story. (BTW, the photo on the home page is of that most iconic of Sicilian images – Mount Etna.)

The spiaggia di Montalbano – the beach where the inspector would daily take his early-morning swim

Camilleri’s creation is the policeman, Inspector Salvo Montalbano. A thing that piqued my interest on my last trip to Sicily was my closeness to the locations included in the books. For example, Montalbano lives and works in a town called Vigata. That is a fictional name and in fact his home and his office are in two very different places. The police station is located in the spectacular hilltop town of Ragusa in southern Sicily. His house, on the other hand, is at Punta Secca, some 30 kilometres away on the coast. In the TV series of the books, the impression is that his commute is about a five-minute drive…

There are plenty of scenes in the television series in which Salvo Montalbano is sat at this balcony at his seaside house, drinking a coffee or something stronger

…oh yes, the TV adaptation. As I say, this suggests that Montalbano lives and works in Southern Sicily. But does he? I doubt it. In one of the earlier books, Excursion to Tindari (2000), Camilleri writes this sentence of Montalbano. “In the afternoon he would drive to Palermo to pick up Livia, on her way down from Genoa.” Livia is his long-suffering girlfriend. My point is that in the book she flies to Palermo. If she was flying from Genoa to meet Montalbano in the television series, she would be flying to Catania. In other words, in Camilleri’s mind when he was writing the books, he wasn’t thinking about Ragusa or Punta Secca. He was imagining somewhere further north and further west.

This is Enzo’s restaurant at Punta Secca: the inspector would usually move heaven and earth to make sure he would have his lunch there every day

Having said that, the locations we see on our screens are gorgeous to contemplate, so there are no complaints from me about the artistic licence that seems likely to have been taken. Indeed, given that the TV adaptation was made during Camilleri’s lifetime, I presume he was happy with the places that had been chosen, and I can see why. (A film producer once told me that in his next life he wanted to come back as a locations director, and again I can see why – it does sound like a lot of fun!)

Camilleri gelato at an ice-cream parlour in Syracuse in Sicily – it’s flavours are tangerine, chocolate and pistachio. Delicious!

You may find that the Montalbano TV programmes will be on BBC4 again some time later this year. If so, I’d recommend a viewing. I’d also recommend to anyone a visit to Sicily.

Robert Green