The Brits have them, the French have them and so do the Swedes and the Poles. All Europeans have cop dramas and police procedurals that reflect their national identities, many of them on Netflix, PBS and Amazon and available for binge watching. I’ve watched a dozen or so of these shows and have come to the conclusion that no one does crime, its detection and its punishments, as well as the Italians. They have lots of history and legend to draw on, going back to Dante and continuing with the Borges and the Mafia.
Montalbano —which follows the pursuits of a Sicilian pasta-loving cop and an expansive cast of quirky characters— held my attention for several seasons. Recently, my go-to show has been Rocco Schavone: Ice Cold Murders, which is set in and around the isolated mountain town of Aosta where corpses are ice cold; many of the crimes are committed in the mountains, bodies buried in the snow.
Rocco Schavone is the name of the detective who leads a squad of quirky police officers. Played forcefully and with nuances by the veteran Italian actor, Marco Giallini, Rocco carries the show on his own shoulders and with his uncommon intelligence which makes him an attractive character with a skill set that matches that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s, London detective Sherlock Holmes. Giallini won an award for his role in the Italian TV show ACAB—All Cops are Bastards.
Rocco has been banished from Rome to Aosta because he’s taken the law into his own hands and has brutally assaulted a serial rapist of teenage girls, and the son of a man with power and influence.
Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Rocco or “Roc” as his pals call him, doesn’t use cocaine. He busts cocaine traffickers and dealers, some of them with ties to high ranking political figures in the Italian government. Rocco’s drugs of choice are tobacco and marijuana which he smokes continually in his own office, in his car and on the streets of Acosta, a real place on the border with France.
Rocco rolls his own joints from the stash he keeps in the top drawer of his desk. He does very little to hide his habits, though he will open a window that affords a view of snow-capped mountains and that lets in clean cold mountain air. “Fuck you” he says to friends and foes.
Rocco works both sides of the street and has no illusions about himself. “I’m a son-of a bitch,” he says in one of the earliest episodes. He enforces the law and he breaks the law in his unrelenting efforts to bring about justice and to seek revenge for the cold-blooded murder of his wife. Almost everything he does on the job is personal as well as political. The show, which is based on the novels of Antonio Mancini, mostly refrains from moral and ethical judgments, which makes it eminently superior in my view to USA police procedurals which crowd the TV networks; bad programming driving out good programming.
Mancini’s critical intelligence and creativity inform the plots and subplots and invigorate the crisp dialogue. His cop quotes Shakespeare and Hegel, loves pizza and white wine and borrows freely from Dante and his 14th century narrative poem, Inferno, which translates as “hell”.
If and when Rocco beats up a suspect and hands him a handkerchief to mop up the blood on his face, it’s not from a sense of kindness, but to obtain a sample of the man’s DNA, so it can be analyzed in a lab with the newest technology.
Rocco doesn’t combat crime on his own, but rather with help from judges, coroners, prosecutors, fellow officers and even from hipster criminals who have his back as he has theirs. The hipster underworld figures even excavate a grave where they’ve hidden the corpse of a man Rocco has shot and killed to protect him from prosecution.
Rocco doesn’t carry a gun, but when he needs one, he finds one in his right hand and then pulls the trigger. A pal takes the gun from him to prevent him from putting a bullet in his head. And ending his life. He ought to enroll in therapy; he talks to his dead wife and sees her when she’s not really there, but he’s too vain to seek help. His dog, Lupa, brings out his best self, as does a troubled teenage boy and punk rocker whom he saves from himself and sets him straight.
He also leads a group of illegal immigrants from Mali through the snow and ice and to a safe haven.
Unlike Detective Montalbano, Rocco isn’t physically attractive; his deeply-lined face reflects his deeply trouble soul, but women, including an investigative newspaper reporter, find him sexually attractive, and take him to bed to fuck his brains out. The sex on the screen can be steamy as well as comedic, especially on one notable occasion when a woman fucks him so vigorously that she unintentionally pops the stitches he’s received to patch a gunshot wound accidentally inflicted by an underling. No one woman receives his loving embrace. His dog, Lupa, who follows him everywhere, is the only living creature and sentient being who brings out his tenderness and love.
If you haven’t seen Rocco in action you might catch him on PBS. The show, all five seasons with nearly two dozen episodes, is made for hinge watching or savoring slowly one at a time. I love Rocco, though I’ve never loved cops, not since cops beat me to a bloody pulp and charged me with the attempted murder of a police officer and criminal anarchy. I was protesting the cold-blooded murders, by law enforcement officers, of two Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark ,while they were asleep in their Chicago apartment. Off the pigs? No way. It was “Off the Panthers.” Cops killed them with impunity. I like to think that Rocco Schavone would draw the line at assassinating Black Panthers. After all, he’s a friend to the poor, to widows, illegal immigrants from Africa, retired workers and old age pensioners.
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