44 The Times Magazine

o a certain demographic, flying

off to Italy for lunch in a Michelin-

starred fish restaurant with sex

and lifestyle icon Inspector

Montalbano is the single most

alluring prospect in the world.

The baby boomer’s answer to a lost

weekend with Harry Styles. Even

allowing for the fact it’s not

technically possible to lunch with

Montalbano – the fictional lead character in

the long-running cult TV series that bears

his name – so I’ll be meeting Luca Zingaretti,

the actor who has played him for the past

20 years (along with an interpreter, because

Zingaretti’s English isn’t great and my Italian

amounts to “spaghetti”), and also allowing for

the fact that this fish restaurant is in Rome,

not the dreamy, crime-spangled parts of Sicily

in which Inspector Montalbano is filmed.

Still. A certain kind of woman would go

to some lengths to be in my place. “You are

lucky,” says one, whom I meet while dog

walking. “I do fancy him. The older one.

Not the younger one.” (Inspector Montalbano

is such a runaway success, scoring some

11 million viewers in Italy for its past few

episodes, close on one million in the UK and

transferring to previously unimaginable

territories such as Cuba, that Netflix recently

revisited it with a spin-off, The Young

Montalbano.) “I don’t think he’s sexy. Not like

the older one.”

The Older One walks into Acciuga on Via

Vodice at the arranged hour in a navy wool

blazer and jeans, a mask on his face, as is still

mandated in Italy, and bumps fists with me.

Apparently, that’s still happening in Italy too.

He is about as Italian as they come: 60,

shortish, stocky, balding, twinkly, charming,

and, yes, I can definitely understand the

widespread fancying. Later in our lunch, I say,

“You know you’re a sex symbol?” and he

doesn’t even wait for the interpreter to do her

thing. “Sì!” he says, his face as open and alight

as a kid with a new toy. “Yes!”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I arrive first and the waiting staff show me

to “Signor Zingaretti’s preferred table” (front

and centre of the unflashy, unassuming

restaurant). Once he arrives, Signor Zingaretti

thinks we’ll be better off out back, where

there’s a quieter private dining area. The staff

move us without hesitation. Of course they do.

Zingaretti is both the Italian equivalent of a

national treasure – a hot Inspector Morse

• and a regular.
  “It’s my favourite!” says Zingaretti, in
  English, once we’re settled, of Acciuga.
  He’s been coming here for years?
  “I’m think, for one month. But five times
  [in one month]. I will have a glass of wine.
  You?”
  I couldn’t possibly – I got up at 3am to

catch my flight and haven’t had breakfast, but

he must. Does he always drink wine at lunch?

“No, usually, no,” he says. “But in this case,

we’re among friends. We have to talk.” He

waves his hands around to indicate ease of

conversational flow.

The unofficial business of my trip is to

try to understand how like Inspector

Montalbano Luca Zingaretti is, how much

of that charming, hopeless, fanciable

commitment-phobe, the affable lunchable

fictional man resides in the man who plays

him (mainly so I can reassure Montalbano’s

middle-aged fans if they should proceed with

their mass crush). My official business is

Zingaretti’s latest project, Il Re, The King.

It’s a classy, costly-looking eight-part

Sky drama in which Zingaretti plays Bruno

Testori, the shady, deeply compromised head

warden of a ferocious Italian prison, the

fictional San Michele. Zingaretti developed

the series with writers from an original idea

(his own) and it is striking how unlike

Inspector Montalbano it is, how dark, how

claustrophobic, how gritty and un-feel-good.

Also, how unlike Inspector Montalbano the

character of Bruno Testori is.

It’s terribly good and terribly bleak, I say.

Was that the intention? After 20 years of

Montalbano’s sunny charm, is Zingaretti keen

to say, “Look! I do dark, hard, morally

questionable too”?

The interpreter takes over. Zingaretti

plunges himself into lengthy TED Talky

contemplation of his craft, the kind I’d

normally interrupt with demands for specifics

and clarifications on waffle, but can’t because

I don’t speak Italian.

“I have to say that, coming from this

experience, Commissario Montalbano, which

has been a 20-year-old experience, it was

certainly demanding. But I was acting and

playing Montalbano two months every three

years at the beginning, then two months every

year after that. The rest of the time, I was

lucky enough to be able to continue working

on other things.”

I can imagine it’s more interesting, but also

less fun, to spend one’s day immersed in the

shady, murderous world of prison politics than,

say, the sunny, murderous, but in a jolly way,

world of Montalbano’s Sicily?

“Montalbano was the light with some dark

spots, or dark sides too, but most of the time

he was light. In this case, Il Re, we have the

dominion of the shadow, which is not only in

the present world – it’s in his soul. I strongly

think and strongly believe in the energy of

people. I smell it. So a negative energy is a bad

smell and a positive one is a nice and pleasant

smell.” I long to ask what my energy smells of,

but he is still talking, or rather his interpreter

is, like a medium possessed by the spirit of

a thespian. “I smell it! I sense it! So it was

T

Fans queue outside his

on-set trailer. ‘One thousand

people, waiting! They treat

me like the Pope’

With Katharina Böhm in Inspector Montalbano, 2000

With their daughters, Bianca

and Emma, December 2021

Zingaretti and Ranieri at

the Oscars last month

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