“Dialect is from the heart, Italian is from the head,” was the watchword of Andrea Camilleri, the creator of the internationally popular Commissario Montalbano television series about a testy police detective in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigata. His unique approach to integrating the dialect of his childhood near Agrigento in Sicily into his novels and TV scripts was celebrated Oct. 16 at Georgetown University in a program honoring the 100th anniversary of Camilleri’s birth.
Sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute, the afternoon gathering featured presentations by Georgetown professors Gianni Cicali, an expert on theatre history, and Anna de Fina, a specialist in linguistics.
Cicali delighted the packed room by revealing that Camilleri, a producer, writer, and teacher, did not begin writing his novels until the age of 69, after having produced plays by Pirandello and Beckett at Rome’s Teatro dei Satiri. During the 1960s, he helped produce the Maigret series for Italian television beginning when there were no video prompters and no ability to tape episodes, making each episode a nerve wracking adventure.
Andrea Camilleri studied stage and film direction in 1948-50 at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts and then worked as a screenwriter and producer. Although he did not graduate from the academy, he returned there in 1977 and held the chair of Film direction for the next 20 years. About 10 million copies of his novels have been sold. He passed away at age 97, working on a TV production right up to a few days before his final heart attack.
When he wrote and produced the Montalbano series starting in 1994, Camilleri hired his former student from the National Academy of Drama, Luca Zingaretti, a gifted but notoriously fractious actor, to play the hero. He drew on his experience in theatre going back to a time when there were few stable theatres and most acting companies were itinerant. The cast of Montalbano, Cicali noted, follows the types of traditional Italian theatre—leading man, leading lady, “lover,” brilliant sidekick, youth, and clown.
He merged this framework with the insertion of Sicilian dialect into the script, spoken by local characters and especially by the bumbling (and beloved) desk clerk at the police station, Catarella.
Even within this traditional setting, Camilleri succeeded in highlighting modern social issues. The deft combination of familiar character types with challenging plots let to a smash television hit.
Italy’s dialects do not fit the traditional definition of dialect, Prof. de Fina explained as she described Camilleri’s way of incorporating dialect into his writing. They are not just variants of the national language but independent Romance languages derived from Latin, often not mutually intelligible and with their own literature. Camilleri believed that dialects must be kept alive, a view increasingly shared by younger Italians.
Sometimes Camilleri would insert a dialect word completely different from standard Italian, sometimes a word that sounded similar but had different consonants, and sometimes an Italian word altered to “sound Sicilian.” For the completely different words, he would add a phrase with the Italian equivalent. Using the dialect word over and over, the reader would come to understand it.
It was Camilleri’s unique mixture of regional Italian, colloquial speech and Sicilian dialect that formed his unique language and made it popular. Prof. de Fina demonstrated this to everyone’s delight by reading the recipe for the Sicilian treat “arancini” of Montalbano’s housekeeper Adelina.
Good news: the Montalbano series is available now on YouTube.
Nora Hamerman is an art historian, music teacher, and freelance writer who lives near Washington DC, where she contributes frequently to diocesan newspapers on cultural topics and is the Arts editor for La Voce Italiana, a regional Italian American paper. A former Fulbright scholar, she studied for three years in Rome and travels regularly to Italy, including as a guide for Road Scholar in Florence.
