THE STAGING OF THE MONTALBANO LANDSCAPE

In 1999 Andrea Camilleri intervened in “The construction of the Sicilian landscape: geographers and writers face to face”. He, of course, was on the side of the writers and declared that, being “one who tells invented stories” he can only take the path of invention. Indeed, like Reuben Monterosso, he defines himself as a novelist and therefore a man of great faith: The strategy for avoiding the so-called “disenchantment with the world” is to construct for one’s characters a land made up of different parts, shaping and structuring a land based on reality.. In the same year, we saw the televised version of the detective novel series featuring Inspector Montalbano. The projection of the written word onto the TV screen required, like any translation, the betrayal of at least one dimension in order to guarantee likeness and verisimilitude. But what happened during the nine seasons from 1999 to 2013 was the progressive voiding and systematic “cleansing” of the “half-made-up places” that form the settings of the Montalbano stories. The very human clutter of the “invented land” was transformed into a silent empty landscape. With a sort of hyperbole the landscape established its independence first from the novel and then from the action, becoming a stage whose function was the (global) reconstruction of an imagined Sicilian geography. Thus we looked on at the broadcasting of a progressive transformation of the landscape into a geographical imagination irreducible to reality, though quite effective for their very concrete repercussions on reality itself.