As Vigata celebrates St George’s Day, an elderly man, born locally, returns to Sicily after having lived in America for many years. On the same day a diary dating from WWII is discovered hidden in an old bunker. Inspector Montalbano is entrusted with the dark secrets revealed in the diary and starts to research the time around which it was written. But during his investigation, a 90-year-old businessman is found murdered in his own home. Montalbano starts to think that the events cannot possibly be unrelated.
In this episode, numerous characters are brought in to the story to tell us about Italy and its past. Fascism and its appeal to the young, teenagers keeping diaries and conquering armies behaving badly all come into play as a possible connection with the murder of an elderly businessman at the start of the episode.
Religion, Italian style also features strongly. We get to hear about the death of the character Pasquano and his colleagues go to his house, bedecked in ornate floral arrangements, to pay respects by praying around his coffin set upon the bed. A more secular tribute takes place in Salvo’s office when Pasquano’s colleagues eat cannoli in his memory. The festival of St George also appears odd to non Italian viewers. Crowds, lights, statues and marching bands are what unite Italians and draw an ex Scicilian home.
We see fishermen from the past in boats at night with lights and cooking stoves frying fish for their children. It is a quaint, nostalgic nod to the things that went on despite Fascist sentiment.
Salvo navigates the various threads of the past and solves two crimes. It shouldn’t be giving too much away to say that not every crime leads to an arrest.
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