'' The Terracotta Dog '' (''
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
: Il cane di terracotta'') is a 1996 novel by
Andrea Camilleri
Andrea Calogero Camilleri (; 6 September 1925 – 17 July 2019) was an Italian writer.
Biography
Originally from Porto Empedocle, Girgenti, Sicily, Camilleri began university studies in the Faculty of Literature at the University of Palermo, ...
, translated into English in 2002 by
Stephen Sartarelli
Stephen Sartarelli (born 1954 in Youngstown, Ohio) is an American poet and translator.
Life
Sartarelli graduated from Antioch College and New York University. Specializing in translations from French and Italian into English, among other things h ...
.
It is the second novel of the internationally popular
Inspector Montalbano series. While chasing down a mafia crime, Montalbano finds a cave with symbolic artifacts and the bodies of two young lovers, hidden since
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
.
Plot summary
![Seven sleepers (Menologion of Basil II)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Seven_sleepers_%28Menologion_of_Basil_II%29.jpg)
The story starts off with "Tano Il Greco", a tired
mafia boss
A crime boss, also known as a crime lord, Don, gang lord, gang boss, mob boss, kingpin, godfather, crime mentor or criminal mastermind, is a person in charge of a criminal organization.
Description
A crime boss typically has absolute or nearl ...
, making a deal with
Montalbano to stage his arrest in order for him to save face. The arrest causes Montalbano to have to appear at a press conference and be considered for promotion, both of which he does not appreciate. At the same time there has also been a seemingly unrelated and mysterious theft of a grocery store delivery truck; the truck is discovered the next morning, abandoned, with the stolen goods still within and intact.
An old man, Misucara, who was witness to the robbery, then dies in a suspicious accident, but not before passing on an odd bit of information to the inspector: that the grocery store owner's car was parked nearby during the time of the robbery. When Tano ends up dying at the hands of mafia rivals during a police transfer, he passes on information to Montalbano that leads the inspector and his team to search for a secret cave used as a
black market goods store during World War II and now used for smuggling arms for the mafia, in which the grocery store owner was complicit.
Montalbano notices that the inside of the cave is not symmetrical and figures out there must be a secret room, where he discovers the bodies of two young lovers, carefully arranged in what appears to be some kind of ancient ritual guarded by a
terracotta
Terracotta, terra cotta, or terra-cotta (; ; ), in its material sense as an earthenware substrate, is a clay-based unglazed or glazed ceramic where the fired body is porous.
In applied art, craft, construction, and architecture, terracotta ...
dog. Learning that the bodies were placed sometime around the
allied invasion and devastating bombing of the island at the end of World War II, Montalbano interviews local residents from that time to try to piece together who the young couple were, why they were killed and why they were ritually buried.
The young couple turn out to be Lisetta, a local girl with a sexually abusive father, and her lover Mario, a young Italian soldier stationed at a repair ship that had been docked for an extended period at the town of Vigata. Believing that his ship was to be called to sail soon, Mario had implored Lisetta to come see him one last time, and she had run away then, which resulted in the two lovers presumably being killed when discovered by the jealous father of Lisetta.
This knowledge, however, does not satisfy the inspector, as while he had deciphered the identity of the couple and the reason for their murder, the ritualistic method of their burial still remained a mystery. One thing that puzzles Montalbano as he learns more about the
ritual burial
Burial, also known as interment or inhumation, is a method of final disposition whereby a dead body is placed into the ground, sometimes with objects. This is usually accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing the deceased and objec ...
is that it doesn't make sense, because it is a mixture of different traditions, and this leads him to look for someone who might have knowledge of different burial rites. And once he has a suspect for the person that conducted the ritual burial, Montalbano stages an elaborate ploy to get onto the TV news so that maybe his suspect living in some other part of Italy might get his message and return to the site of the crime 50 years later.
It turns out Lisetta's cousin Lillo, who had been very fond of his little cousin, had put up the couple at Lisetta's request in his house. However, the couple had been killed one day when Lillo was out of the house by Lisetta's father's man. Lillo, in his rage, then killed the man. In a state of denial over the incident, he then buries the two lovers in a ritual miming the legend of the
Seven Sleepers
In the Islamic and Christian traditions, the Seven Sleepers, otherwise known as the Sleepers of Ephesus and Companions of the Cave, is a medieval legend about a group of youths who hid inside a cave outside the city of Ephesus (modern-day S ...
, in the hopes that like the sleepers, they will reawaken one day. Due to his academic work in studying the legend, he invokes both
Christian and
Islamic elements in the ritual. He then left
Sicily
(man) it, Siciliana (woman)
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in the hopes of putting all this behind him, until the Inspector resurrected the lovers with his discovery.
Characters
*
Salvo Montalbano
Inspector, the chief of a precinct or station of the Italian National Police, i.e. a . Salvo Montalbano is a fictional police chief who is a brilliant detective created by Italian writer Andrea Camilleri in a series of novels and short stories. ...
, Vigàta's chief police station
* Domenico "Mimì" Augello, Montalbano's deputy and close friend
* Giuseppe Fazio, Montalbano's right-hand man
* Agatino Catarella, police officer
* Livia Burlando, Montalbano's eternal girlfriend
* Dr. Pasquano, Vigàta's local forensic pathologist
* Tano "Il Greco", mafia boss
* Lisetta Moscato and Mario Cunich, two young lovers buried in the cave
* Calogero Rizzitano, witness of the murder
* Headmaster Burgio, retired teacher and Montalbano's friend
* Gegè Gullotta, Montalbano's boyhood friend
Adaptation
It was first adapted for television by
RAI
RAI – Radiotelevisione italiana (; commercially styled as Rai since 2000; known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane) is the national public broadcasting company of Italy, owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. RAI operates many ter ...
with
Luca Zingaretti
Luca Zingaretti (; born 11 November 1961) is an Italian actor and film director, known for playing Salvo Montalbano in the '' Inspector Montalbano'' mystery series based on the character and novels created by Andrea Camilleri. Zingaretti is a na ...
in the TV series ''
Inspector Montalbano''. The episode was first aired on 9 May 2000.
[
]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Terracotta Dog
1996 novels
Inspector Montalbano novels
Italian crime novels
Italian mystery novels
Novels set in Sicily
Picador (imprint) books
20th-century Italian novels
Italian novels adapted into television shows