2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Andrea Camilleri: brilliant playwright, director, intellectual, poet, and one of the most beloved Italian writers of the 20th century. The much-loved creator of Inspector Montalbano left us in 2019, after dedicating his life to telling the world about Sicily, its contradictions, charms, vices and virtues. We like to remember him for his contagious wit, his boundless curiosity, and his deep love for his homeland.

Andrea Camilleri was born on September 6th, 1925, in Porto Empedocle, a small seaside town near Agrigento, where he spent a childhood he liked to call “agricultural and rural.” The literary ferment surrounding him—from Pirandello to Sciascia—laid the foundation for what would become his destiny: writing. Like many before and after him, he lived the tension between his deep love for Sicily and the need to leave it behind in order to fully embrace his creative calling. So when asked in an interview what he missed most about his homeland, he simply answered: “u scrusciu du mari”(the sound of the sea).

That sound, that sea, and Sicily itself never truly left him. They lived on in his slow, intense way of speaking and in his writing bold yet simple, shaped by his deep understanding of the nuances of the Sicilian language.

U scrusciu du mari (the sound of the sea) you can almost hear it in every page, in every twist and turn of the beloved Commissioner Montalbano’s adventures, born from Camilleri’s pen and embraced by millions across the globe. In the imagined streets of Vigata, we glimpse the familiar features of Porto Empedocle, while Montelusa gently echoes the landscape of Agrigento.

And in this scenario, sometimes imaginary and sometimes evocative, with both cunning and insight, the Commissioner—masterfully portrayed by Luca Zingaretti in the television series—solves captivating cases, surrounded by the irresistible flavors of Agrigento’s cuisine, authentic, introverted, and enigmatic characters, and the slow rhythms of life, punctuated by small pauses to gaze at the Mediterranean Sea.

Camilleri was an emblematic figure, a key reference for contemporary Italian literature. We must remember him for the concluding speech he gave after the “Conversazioni su Tiresia” performance, a “cuntu” on the mythological Greek seer in which the author reflected on seeing himself, repeatedly, throughout his life. The show took place at the Greek Theatre of Syracuse in June 2018, where over four thousand spectators were moved by what remains today as Andrea Camilleri’s spiritual testament.

«Ninety-three years. That’s a lot! And I became a director, of theatre, television, and radio. I wrote more than a hundred novels. A character of mine, Montalbano, happily travels the world. That should have been enough, right? No, it wasn’t enough. Because at ninety, having gone blind, an immense curiosity arose in me, to understand… no, ‘understand’ is the wrong verb. It cannot be understood. But to ‘guess’ what eternity is. That eternity, which now feels so close to me. And then I thought that coming here, to this theatre, among these truly eternal stones, I would at least have a glimpse of it. You may wonder what I do and how I live. Well. Right now, I live in Brooklyn, selling matches as part of a camp life, and sometimes I make a “comparsata” in the cinema. But the miracle happened. A director (myself, by the way) asked me to play the role of Tiresias. And finally, after centuries, person and character were reunited. One more thing I’d like to say. I’d like to see all of you again. Every one of you. Here, on an evening like this. In a hundred years».

Happy Birthday, Maestro: your legacy will forever walk with us, in our hearts and in our thoughts.