Sentado Quieto

Great series! Beautiful contrasting backgrounds (mountainous, cold snowy Aosta vs urban, warm, home-sick for the protagonist Rome), and extraordinary characters. I am a big fan of Montalbano, but Schiavone is so much deeper and interesting as a character than the Sicilian! With his small time corruption practices, his disregard for others, that so easily transforms into profound care, and his combination of inner demons and inner angels. Fantastic work by Marco Giallini. But the highlight of the series for me is the evolving relation between Schiavone and Caterina. From the first (politically quite incorrect for a boss addressing a much younger subordinate!) casual flirting of Schiavone, to the subtle way in which she starts discovering his soft inner self and unexpectedly develops feelings for him, the initial reluctance of the older man to let it develop (marvelous flat scene when Schiavone reveals his inner tragedy to her), to what for me is the highest point of the series so far: the restaurant face to face between Schiavone and Caterina: a masterful performance of Marco Giallini and Claudia Vismara: Schiavone slowly preparing the scene before starting to deliver his increasingly bitter and cruel punches, while Vismara’s face progressively changes from happiness to concern, then to tears and desparation. Bravo for Giallini and Vismara: if Schiavone were an opera, this would be the trademark duo that it would be known for! It is a shame that the chemistry of both —the characters and the actors— is lost for most of the subsequent episodes. We just get to see a glimpse of it in series 3 (thanks to the TV script for transforming what in the books is a simple phone call, into another Giallini/Vismara face to face). Let’s hope we get much more of Claudia Vismara vis a vis Marco Giallini in the final series: she is the best-kept secret ingredient of the series success.