100 years of Andrea Camilleri whose writing overflowed with love for Sicily

Andrea Camilleri would have turned 100 this year.  He was a wildly popular Italian writer, screenwriter, director, and playwright and the creator of Inspector Montalbano, a most beloved literary character in Italy and abroad, thanks in part to the television adaptation.

Camilleri was born in Porto Empedocle, the "marina" of Agrigento, on September 6, 1925, a distant relative of fellow countryman Luigi Pirandello. With access to his family's well-stocked libraries, he showed a passion for reading at an early age, particularly adventure stories, detective novels (especially Simenon), and theatrical magazines.

Education and Early Experience

After his classical studies, Camilleri enrolled in the Faculty of Literature at the University of Palermo, although he never graduated. He moved to Rome in 1949 to attend the National Academy of Dramatic Arts, the only candidate admitted to the directing course (he would later teach that very course from 1977 to 1997). Here he gained his first experiences as a stage director, later joining RAI in 1957 as a TV director. From 1958 to 1965 and 1968 to 1970, he taught at Italy’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.

In 1978, he made his fiction debut with Il corso delle cose (The Way Things Go) (written between 1967 and 1968). In 1980, he published Un filo di fumo (A Thread of Smoke) where he first introduced the fictional town of Vigata, the setting for his historical novels and, famously, many of Salvo Montalbano's investigations. The novel earned Camilleri his first literary prize, in Gela.

Inspector Montalbano and the tv series

The Shape of Water, the first TV adaptation to feature Inspector Montalbano, played by Luca Zingaretti, was released in 1994.

In 1999 production company, Palomar, began to adapt Camilleri's stories about Inspector Montalbano for RAI; directed mostly by Alberto Sironi. New episodes and numerous reruns over the following decades are consistently acclaimed by viewers, who never seem to tire of bickering with Catarella, the curious characters populating the investigations, and the sunny countryside fringed by crystal-clear sea where they are set.

Rooted in reality, Camilleri's novels describe Italy and Sicily in all their facets, reproducing them in the fictional world that revolves around Vigata and the fictional province of Montelusa.

Vigata, key location in Inspector Montalbano

Vigata (Porto Empedocle in Camilleri's imagination) is created for the screen using a collection of Baroque jewels: Ibla, Scicli, Sampieri (the Penna furnace to the east, on the Pisciotto cliff, is recognisable as the Mànnara), Donnalucata, Monte Crasto, Donnafugata Castle (the sumptuous residence of the mafia boss Balduccio Sinagra), Modica, Marina di Ragusa, Comiso, Vittoria, Scoglitti, Brucoli, Noto, Scopello, and various other sites in south-eastern Sicily (see all the locations in Inspector Montalbano).

The success of the TV series coincided with that of Camilleri’s novels, which grew to become a publishing sensation in 1998 with La concessione del telefono and, the following year, La mossa del cavallo.

The distribution of his novels and films, which were translated into 40 languages, brought Camilleri great international fame.

The heart of Camilleri's novels

Camilleri explores a variety of themes in his 110+ novels and short stories, that cannot be simplified as “historical and civil matters”, and the Montalbano saga (28 novels, plus short stories and collections). Sicily, however, is omnipresent, while one of his distinctive traits is the frequent mixing of Italian and Sicilian.

Camilleri died on July 17, 2019, at the age of 94. As per his wishes, exactly one year later, Riccardino, epilogue to Montalbano, was published. He had written it in 2005, delivered it to the publisher Sellerio and revised it in 2016.

In the centenary year of his birth, the Andrea Camilleri Foundation has scheduled a broad program of initiatives to commemorate and promote awareness of the writer.