Andrea Camilleri
Theatre director and communist catapulted to fame in old age for his Inspector Montalbano novels
ANDREA CAMILLERI, who has died in Rome aged 93, was an Italian television and theatre director who in old age achieved global fame as the author of the Inspector Montalbano detective novels, set in a fictitious seaside town on the south coast of Sicily called Vigàta.
To his dying day, Camilleri, a chain smoker and atheist, remained an unrepentant communist, even though the Montalbano books had sold 30 million copies worldwide and made him a multi-millionaire.
Few remember today, but Italy had the largest communist party in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc before the lowering of the hammer and sickle flag above the Kremlin for the last time in 1991.
During the Cold War, the Partito Comunista d’italia (PCI) had never quite gained enough votes to form a government in Italy, but was able to infiltrate its supporters into the vital organs of the nation’s cultural apparatus and dominate them.
This was what Antonio Gramsci, Italy’s foremost communist intellectual and co-founder of the PCI in 1921, had preached: the revolutionary priority should be to take control of the means of culture rather than, as classical Marxism demanded, the means of production.
After the fall of fascism, so successful was the PCI at putting into practice what Gramsci had preached that it controlled vast swathes of the Italian media and the education system by the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Camilleri, who joined the PCI in 1945, was a typical product of what has been called the long march through the institutions by the post-war communist Left.
He spent most of his working life as a director working for the state television broadcaster RAI, where the PCI was especially powerful. In 2004 he happily told an audience: “I have been a true communist and I renounce nothing from the past.”
Yet, as a teenager in the fascist era, he was such a fervent supporter of Mussolini that in the 1930s he even wrote to the Duce begging him to lower the age at which an Italian could become a soldier, so that he could fight for the cause. Mussolini wrote back to refuse, adding: “But do not despair, there will be plenty of time.”
In later life, Camilleri was a virulent critic of the Right-wing media tycoon and four-time Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and of Italy’s new populist coalition government leaders – especially the radical-right Matteo Salvini.
Both Berlusconi and Salvini have the “mentalità fascista”, he insisted. But he despaired even more of the Italians who elected such people their leaders, accusing them of having “fascismo in their DNA”.
He would frequently repeat the warning given by an American journalist at the end of the Second World War – Herbert Matthews of The New York Times – that the Italians had “not really killed” fascism because it is a sickness that will “reappear in forms that you will not recognise”.
Andrea Calogero Camilleri was born in Porto Empedocle near Agrigento on the south coast of Sicily on September 6 1925, the only child of the port inspector who was a fascist of the first hour and had participated in the March on Rome in 1922 which brought Mussolini to power.
His family was related to that of the playwright Luigi Pirandello, winner
of the 1934 Nobel Prize for literature and a committed fascist. Both families owned shares in the same local sulphur mine, which caused them to row frequently.
Originally sent to a seminary to study for the priesthood, Andrea was expelled for throwing eggs at a crucifix, and in later life would describe himself as a “non-militant atheist”.
He then attended the Liceo Classico in Agrigento and passed his maturità – the equivalent of A-levels – in the early summer of 1943 without taking the exams: they had been cancelled due to the Allied bombardments of Sicily prior to the July invasion to liberate Italy.
In 1944 he enrolled at the University of Palermo to study literature, but soon abandoned the course and moved to Enna, a remote town in the mountains of the Sicilian interior which had a small but lively artistic community; he spent much of his time in the local library.
He lived in what he would later describe as “two miserable rooms”, but it was those rooms which “formed” him. In them, he began to write poetry, winning a national prize, the Premio Firenze, in 1947, and in 1949 he was admitted to the prestigious Accademia Nazionale d’arte Drammatica in Rome to study stage and film, where he remained until 1952.
He then specialised in the plays of Pirandello and was the first to stage a Samuel Beckett play in Italy – Endgame in 1957.
That year he married Rosetta Dello Siesto, a Milanese graduate in literature from Rome’s Sapienza University who in later life he would describe as “the backbone of my existence”. And he began directing television productions for RAI, including a series based on Georges Simenon’s great detective, Inspector Maigret.
It was in 1978 that Camilleri wrote his first novel, but it was refused by 10 publishers so he paid for it to be published himself. It was a flop. Another novel in 1980 was also a disaster. Depressed but determined, he hung about – now aged 55 – for days on end outside the Italian House of Commons, Montecitorio, hoping to pounce on Leonardo Sciascia, the bestselling author of stories about the Mafia who was from Camilleri’s province in Sicily and a Radical Party MP.
In the end, Camilleri succeeded in collaring the great man outside Montecitorio and handed him his manuscript. Sciascia sat down on the spot and began to flick through the document before telling him: “Nirì [Andrea in Sicilian dialect], you’re wasting your time.”
There would pass more than a decade before Camilleri wrote his third novel, La stagione della caccia, set in 19thcentury Sicily, which was published in 1992 and sold well. However, it was his first novel featuring Inspector Montalbano, La forma dell’acqua,
published in 1994 when he was pushing 70, set in “Vigàta” (really the town of his birth, Porto Empedocle) and written in a hybrid of Sicilian dialect and Italian, which made him a household name. Inspired by Simenon’s Maigret and Pepe Carvalho, the Spanish detective created by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, after whom he is named, Camilleri’s Inspector Salvo Montalbano is a loner who has a passion for only the finest local food. Montalbano insists on eating well and alone – even in restaurants, which is why he always goes to the Trattoria San Calogero, where the padrone thrills and inspires him by saying things like: “I’ve got certain rock lobsters today ready for the grill that’ll seem like you’re not eating them but dreaming them.”
The food must be local and it must be traditional. For Inspector Montalbano eating is Holy Communion – a communion with his terra. In Maigret’s case, eating good food helped him to solve the crime; for Montalbano it is akin to religious ecstasy and does not directly affect the case. But the details of what to eat, where, when and how, signify the detective’s intimate knowledge of Sicily – without which he would be unable to solve the crime.
When he is obliged to eat at home, the devoted woman who keeps his house cooks only exquisite traditional Sicilian dishes – even if by the time he returns home she is long gone and he has to take them out of the fridge.
Unmarried, with a volatile girlfriend who comes and goes from distant Genova, Montalbano is a typical fictional detective – a quirky and tricky outsider who is no longer young but not yet old, who has seen it all and is regarded as a loose cannon by superiors who tolerate him because he gets results.
Since 1999, RAI has serialised the Montalbano books – there are 25 of them, as well as short story collections – propelling their sales figures into the stratosphere. The actor who plays Montalbano is Luca Zingaretti, brother, as it happens, of the leader of Italy’s post-communist party – the Partito Democratico. Inspector Montalbano is shown in Britain on BBC Four.
The other ever-present element in the stories is Inspector Montalbano’s Left-wing convictions, a watereddown version of Camilleri’s own communism, which means that the books are peppered with criticisms of contemporary Right-wing Italian politicians.
Most recently this critique would be aimed at the attempts by Italy’s populist government to stop illegal migrants being shipped from Libya to Italy (many to Sicily), a phenomenon which has seen the populist coalition soar in the opinion polls.
As Camilleri told The Guardian in 2012: “There’s very little sense of the history of France in the Maigret books. There is no social fact or an event that allows the story to be dated. In my books, I deliberately decided to smuggle into a detective novel a critical commentary on my times.”
In Italy, it is sometimes said that Camilleri’s Montalbano books would never have been successful without the support of the Italian Left, which was the dominant force in Italian culture.
Every time he presented a new Montalbano book in the early days, for example, there would be blanket television coverage and the guaranteed presence of all the big Leftist names of the day – such is the continued firm grip of communist and now post-communist ideology on culture in Italy. Nevertheless, Camilleri, who was near blind in later years and had to dictate his novels to an assistant, did create in Salvo Montalbano a great fictional detective who had his priorities right regardless of his politics: justice – and good food.
Andrea Camilleri is survived by his wife and their three daughters.
Andrea Camilleri, born September 6 1925, died July 17 2019