Montalbano's back!
Has anyone been watching Montalbano over the years?
It's not to everyone's taste, admittedly, and subtitles might put people off, but this 20-year old series does have an addictive charm!
It's back on BBC4, having started yesterday with the first of two episodes, and more are due next year, I believe.
The author of the novels, Andrea Camilleri, likes to make socio-political statements in them, which is quite interesting from an outsider's point of view! He likes to stir things up a bit!
This current episode deals with the boat people being trafficked into Sicily, a problem which is as contentious and divisive in Italy as Brexit might be here.
However, those statements are easy to ignore if you just want some simple crime-solving in a Sicilian setting!
By the way, if you want to use the programmes to practice your Italian comprehension, forget it........ it's far too fast and a lot of Sicilian dialect words are used. However, with the subtitles to help, you can pick out quite a few words and phrases here and there.
If I remember, they also tried a spinoff....." Young Montalbano"..... a bit like the Endeavour spin-off from Morse.
Ok, "The Bridge" it isn't. It's more of a chocolate eclair than the Nordic Noir series were, but it's nice to have some sunshine and warm sea, plates of pasta and aromatic espressos in a detective series!