111 Ah, servile Italy . . . a brothel!:
Purgatorio
6:77-79; my translation.
111 Italy was still servile . . . thanks to a helmsman whom she would be better off without:
The “helmsman” being, of course, Silvio Berlusconi.
114
Lupus in fabula:
Latin, literally, “a wolf in the story.” The figurative meaning is the same as “speak of the devil.”
122 “But tomorrow is August the fifteenth!”:
August 15 is
Ferragosto,
the biggest holiday of the summer.
133 “Better sunstroke than looking like somebody going to the Pontida meetings”:
Montalbano is referring to the politicians of the secessionist extreme-right Lega Nord (Northern League), who stage their political summits at Pontida in northern Italy and are fond of wearing baseball caps.
133
“Vocumprà?”:
A common refrain recited by foreign street peddlers in Italy, usually of North African or sub-Saharan origin. The word is a corruption of the phrases
Vuoi comprare
or
Vuole comprare,
both of which mean, “Do you want to buy?”
168 a quatrain by Pessoa:
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was Portugal’s greatest modern poet.
190 he was acting like the soldier who doesn’t want to go to war:
A reference to the Sicilian expression
fari u fissu pri nun iri a la guerra,
which means to feign ignorance to avoid doing something unpleasant. Literally, the phrase means “to play dumb so as not to go to war.”
207 “Maybe we ought to use little folded-up pieces of paper, like Provenzano”:
Montalbano is referring to the famous
pizzini
of Bernardo Provenzano, the Mafia “boss of bosses” arrested in 2006 after forty-three years on the run. Provenzano used these little folded-up messages to communicate his orders to the various agents of his crime network. In an April 21, 2006, op-ed in the
New York Times,
written on the occasion of Provenzano’s arrest, Camilleri stated: “The authorities said that Mr. Provenzano would transmit his orders—regarding such matters as who should be rewarded with government contracts, whom one should vote for in local and national elections, how one should act on specific occasions—by means of
pizzini,
little scraps of paper folded several times over, which his trusty couriers (mostly peasants with spotless records) would pass from hand to hand along lengthy, circuitous, and seemingly random routes.These were necessary precautions to reduce, as much as possible, the risk of interception. One
pizzino,
for example, took more than forty-eight hours to travel the mile between the boss’s cottage and Corleone. Others could take weeks to reach a nearby destination.The telephone was out of the question. In every
pizzino,
there was always a mention of God and his will and protection.”
In 2007 Camilleri published a book on Provenzano’s
pizzini
entitled
Voi non sapete
(You Don’t Know) in which he explains, in the form of a dictionary, some sixty of the Sicilian words most frequently used by the crime boss.The book’s title refers to Provenzano’s statement to the authorities upon arrest, in which he was alluding to the Mafia war that he thought would break out after his removal from power. All proceeds from the book go to a charitable organization founded to help victims of Mafia violence.
Notes by Stephen Sartarelli