Rocco Schiavone, the cynical and unruly anti-hero we can’t do without – Corriere.it

An alien in Aosta, with a rough approach to the world. A Capitoline version but equally bristling with quills of Inspector Montalbano and like him capable of arousing, in fans of the respective television series, a rivalry like the one between fans of Beatles And Rolling Stones. A cynical and incorrect deputy commissioner, who would have all the characteristics to be hated, yet – now that he is about to return with the fifth season – managed in his absence to make us feel nostalgic. why Rocco Schiavone, the character created by the pen of Antonio Manzini, uprooted from his Trastevere, is not afraid to face life and the snow with a couple of clarks and a loden

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He is not afraid to show annoyance at everyone around him and admiration only for Lupa, the foundling whose name takes him back to his origins. And, without breaking his heart, he classifies each event on the basis of his very personal scale of cracking levels of cogli: in no particular order, they range from screaming children to Iban zeros, from sand in clams to Radio Mariafrom closed tobacconists to bars without the Algida, to the maximum peak reached by invitations to ceremonies in general, first of all the invitation to act as godfather or wedding witness.

It’s hard not to envy this one of hers ability not to adapt and look at the world with disenchantment and melancholy humanity: he who in the face of injustice does not give up putting humanity before the law, cannot find peace in his heart, eternally in love with Marinahis wife killed in his place.

On television, we even get to forgive him for some not too chivalrous attitudes towards women, such as preferring them to the pleasures of the table (except for dinners with friends, a sore point after the betrayal of one of them, ed) the smoke of some joint, his secular prayer in the morning. Rocco is someone who doesn’t keep in shape, smokes like a Turk, eats badly…, writes Manzini not by chance.

A character who with just a few words manages to explain – even to non-Romans like me – the difference not only between good heavens And sticazzi
but also between absence and loss, with a touch of romanticism that moves (who among you hasn’t shed a few tears watching him converse with the ghost of his lifelong companion, crossword champion?). The trick to success? Drawing, without beating about the bush, from everyday life to make the right chords vibrate and excite: Yes, the absence can be tolerated, the loss instead… the loss that hurts, the loss makes no sense
– explains Schiavone in an “historic” passage—. Absence is an emotion without a body… I don’t know it, while loss I know it very well. like having something beautiful in your hand and then at a certain point… it disappears like that, suddenly… like Steve Wonder and Ray Charles… Ray Charles went blind, while Steve Wonder was blind from birth. Steve Wonder felt the absence, while Ray Charles the loss… And the loss much worse!.

Dante would have made him a character in his infernal circles, he who experiences exile (and being exiled) in the mountains as an almost divine punishment for the crimes he has committed. Roman and Romanist, melancholic and shy, an extreme kaleidoscope of our defects, we missed Rocco for his know how to be a hero with stain, capable of bringing out the fragile part of us and making us look at our imperfections without judging ourselves too much. unthinkable to imagine an interpreter other than Marco Giallini for his character. By now Giallini Schiavone, and always will be.