page 47 -- who until six months ago had worked in Bolzano -- Bolzano is in a far northern, Alpine region of Italy where roughly half the population speaks German.
page 49 -- Saying hello and goodbye must not be the rule around, here -- In Italy it is customary for people, even clients, to greet each other upon entering and exiting places of public commerce such as shops and restaurants.
page 54 -- as Orlando in fury had done with his sword -- A reference to the classic sixteenth-century Italian chivalric romance, Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto (1434--1533).
Page 67 -- Turi.. Turiddru -- Sicilian diminutives for the name Salvatore.
page 77 D'Annunzto -- Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863--1938), an Italian poet and author much celebrated in his time, wrote a novel entitled Forse che si, forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No), published in 1910.
page 79 -- salary of two million two hundred thousand lire -- About PS715,000.
page 81 -- The tombs shall open, the dead shall rise -- A line from the Italian national anthem, often ironically quoted to express astonishment at the occurrence of an unusual event.
page 83 -- nunnatu -- Sicilian for neonato (i.e., newborn'). Calogero is referring to tiny baby fish that one is not allowed to catch except on occasions such as the one alluded to here. Also called cicirella (or cicureddra).
page 94 -- patati cunsati -- Seasoned potatoes.
page 99 -- 'May you bear only sons' - The full expression, uttered often as a toast at weddings, is auguri e figli maschi (literally, 'best wishes and male children').
page 112 -- A debate between those in favour of and those against building a bridge over the Strait of Messina -- Whether or not to build a bridge over the turbulent Strait of Messina, site of the passage between Scylla and Charybdis in ancient Greek myth, has long been a subject of public debate in Italy. Most recently Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, even while slashing social benefits and privatizing many state-run industries, revived the project to span the Strait, as part of a broad public-works programme intended above all to serve his own greater glory. Camilleri's reference to the question should be seen in this context.
page 123 -- Punta Raisi -- The airport of Palermo.
page 136 -- 'Excursion to Tindari' -- Excursion to Tindari (Picador, 2005) is the previous book in the Inspector Montalbano series.
page 147 -- Thirty million lire' -- Just under PS10,000.
page 150 -- Nottata persa e figlia femmina -- Literally: 'a night lost, and it's a girl'. A Sicilian saying first quoted by Camilleri in Excursion to Tindari, it means more or less 'what a lot of wasted effort'. As the narrator explains in that book, it is 'the proverbial saying ... of the husband who has spent a whole night beside his wife in labour, only to see her give birth to a baby girl instead of that much-desired son.'
page 159 -- 'La donna e mobile' -- Aria from Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto.
page 162 -- the violin of Maestro Cataldo Barbera -- A reference to the reclusive violinist of Camilleri's Voice of the Violin (Picador, 2005), whose virtuosic skills ultimately inspire Inspector Montalbano to solve the case of that book.
page 179 -- pasta 'ncasdata -- One of the many forms of southern Italian pasta al forno, that is. a casserole of oven-baked pasta and other ingredients. Pasta 'ncasciata generally contains small macaroni, nana or caciocavallo cheese, ground beef, mortadella or salami, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, aubergine, grated Pecorino cheese, basil, olive oil and a splash of white wine.
page 181 -- 'Seven hundred million lire in all' -- About PS230,000.
page 187 -- 'that guy who was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge ... that other guy, the one who faked being kidnapped by the Mafia, shot himself in the leg, and then drank a cup of poisoned coffee in prison...' -- The man found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge was Roberto Calvi, President of the Banco Ambrosiano, a bank with ties to the Vatican, not to mention a host of holdings in offshore companies and Swiss bank accounts, and closely connected to a shadowy network of secret Masonic lodges, mafiosi, politicians, and arms traders. The second man Montalbano alludes to was Michele Sindona, a financier at the centre of a similar, and indeed related, web of interests. It was, in fact, while investigating Sindona that the Italian courts eventually discovered the existence of the famous P2 Masonic lodge -- whose membership included industrial barons, intelligence men, neo-Fascists, mafiosi, and numerous politicians -- triggering a scandal that would ultimately spell the ruin, in the early 1990s, of the Christian Democratic Party, which had dominated the Italian government since the end of the Second World War.
page 168 -- 'So he plays the fool,.as the saying goes, to avoid going to war' -- Fa u fissa pi nun iri a la guerra. A Sicilian-Calabrian expression that essentially means to feign ignorance or to play dumb'.
page 106 -- 'O Gesu binidtto!- O blessed Jesus! (Sicilian dialect).
page 208 -- Signora Clementina -- Clementina Vasile-Cozzo is a character in both The Snack Thief and Voice of the Violin and a friend of Inspector Montalbano.
Notes by Stephen Sartarelli
im6 The Scent of the Night (2005) Page 18
