Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to become one of Italy's finest writers, mastering a style akin to literary baroque - intense,
tortured and surreal. His haunting novel La Diceria dell'Untore (The Plague Sower;
1981), which won Italy's Campiello Prize, is the story of a tuberculosis patient at a
Palermo sanatorium in the late 1940s. Guiding the reader through a landscape of doom,
Bufalino invokes the horrors of wartime and the hopelessness of the patients who come to
know each other 'before our lead-sealed freight car arrives at the depot of its destination'.
Leonardo Sciascia's collection of his top short stories, The Wine Dark Sea , explores the complicated
world of Sicilian Mafia culture.
Well-known feminist novelist and playwright Dacia Maraini (born 1936) has written a
number of novels set in Sicily, including the award-winning historical romance La Lunga
Vita di Marianna Ucrìa (The Silent Duchess; 1990), which was made into the film Mari-
anna Ucrìa by Italian director Roberto Faenze in 1997.
INSPECTOR MONTALBANO
Crime-fiction writer Michael Dibdin once wrote that there are three hardship postings that no Italian cop wants:
Sicily, Sardinia and the Alto Adige. We're pretty sure that Inspector Salvo Montalbano, the much-loved protagon-
ist in Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano books ( www.andreacamilleri.net ), would indignantly deny that this was the
case. When not using his boundless stores of intuition and charm to solve crimes in the fictional town of Vigàta
(based on Camilleri's birthplace of Porto Empedocle near Agrigento), this proudly Sicilian sleuth divides his time
between gastronomy (only local dishes) and his long-suffering girlfriend, Livia. Our favourite excerpt of dialogue
would have to be this: Waiter: 'What can I get for you, Inspector?' Montalbano: 'Everything'.
There are 17 novels and four short-story collections in the Montalbano series, all set in Sicily. Start with the in-
spector's first outing in La Forma dell'Acqua (The Shape of Water; 1994) and you're unlikely to want to stop un-
til you've read them all.
Devotees of the acclaimed TV adaptation, starring Luca Zingaretti, can book an Inspector Montalbano tour
with Echoes Events ( Click here ) or Allakatalla ( Click here ). Both these tours visit Ragusa, where the series is
filmed, and Echoes can organise for you to eat at Don Calogero's trattoria or stay overnight in the Inspector's
beachside house in Scicli.
Through Foreign Eyes
A number of foreigners or expats have also written about Sicily. Enjoyable but light-
weight titles include Peter Moore's humorous travelogue Vroom by the Sea (2007), which
recounts his adventures exploring the island on a Vespa named Donatella (because it's the
same shade of lurid orange as Donatella Versace); Brian P Johnston's Sicilian Summer: A
 
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