The poetics of ‘Rocco Schiavone’ sound good to me

'Make it sing!’

Marco Giallini as Rocco Schiavone (publicity photo)

When I was a young journalist, writing boring, technical stories for a trade newspaper in New York, sitting in a far corner of the newsroom, one day I heard a voice yelling:

“NORDBERG! Get Over HERE!”

It was the voice of the news editor, a fierce stickler for detail, late in his career but sharp as ever. His name: Buck Gunther.

That’s Buck GUNther. Say it quickly, three times: Buck GUNther, Buck GUNther, Buck GUNther. Each GUN like a shot in the heart.

I sloped up to the newsdesk, expecting punishment, or at best public humiliation. I was less than a month into job, still on probation. I’d just taken out a lease I couldn’t afford on a modest-yet-expensive studio apartment in the Brooklyn, having just moved from Chicago. I knew no one in New York, except the other journalists in the back of the room, whom I’d only met a few weeks ago. They were about to learn how stupid I was.

Buck sat me down, worked deliberately, sentence-by-sentence, through my story, showing me each wrong word, in each bad sentence, each misunderstanding of the technicalities of the story, and of the process of writing it.

What next? Fired? Who knows.

As I slumped back the length of the long central aisle, past the desks of all my new colleagues, I heard that voice again:

“NORDBERG!”

Then more softly:

“Make it SING!”

Writing at its best is like music. The pitch Buck used for “SING” was slightly higher than the rest. I heard a smile on his face, even though both he and I had our backs to each other. If I rewrote the story well enough, maybe I might still have a job next week.

Eight months later, I was Buck’s deputy.

These memories came back recently while we were watching the Rai 2 television series “Ice Cold Murders: Rocco Schiavone.” In our household, a few years ago, we had viewed and enjoyed the first two seasons (2016-18) – once we found them somewhere on a streaming platform. Like a lot of other detective series – in print and on the screen – the back story was important. But it had faded from memory before we’d discovered this year (2024) that third (2018-19), fourth (2021) and fifth (2023) seasons had since emerged. (Streaming services haven’t learned yet how to tell viewers what they need to know. But that’s another story.)

The shows are based on novels by Antonio Manzini, a writer, director, actor and screenwriter. Piecing the back story back together meant paying unusually close attention to the details – the lesson from Buck GUNther. How was this story constructed?

In many ways, the structure of each season is like every other decent cop series: a crime, multiple mis-directions, and always a twist at the end. Running through the series is, always now, a back story: the detective’s love troubles, old cases haunting, the glue that holds a series together. I won’t spoil your fun by giving you too much of the detail of this story here.

As you watch it, pay attention to the sound of the show and the shape of the words. The background music is soft, lyrical, a complement to the views and vistas of Aosta, a pretty town in northern Italy on the southern side of the Alps, not far from the Swiss and French borders. But this is a place that’s either chilly (summer) or outright cold (other seasons), and always raining or snowing. Not so welcoming for a native of sunny Rome, like Schiavone, who always seems to need an overcoat. The music, complex rhythmically, is appropriately sad.

Except when it’s interrupted.

Inspector Rocco Schiavone – Ispettore, he constantly reminds witnesses and suspects, not Commissario (he’s been demoted, part of his back story) – has a phone in his overcoat pocket. He gets frequent calls from people in his past and present. Its ringtone screams out the “Ode to Joy” from the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, played on an electric guitar, with the notes elongated and bent out of shape.

We watched with subtitles, like most non-Italians, but I couldn’t escape from the sound of the dialogue. In most Italian dialects, I’m told, many words are spoken with a stress on the next to last syllable, and then let the final, unstressed one rise in pitch. For many other words, the stress comes on the second to last syllable of a word that’s long enough to have three syllables or more. A lot do.

Think of that herb used to great effect in Italian cooking: In America, I grew up saying o-REG-an-o. In Britain, where I live now, most people say, incorrectly to my ear, o-ree-GAN-o, thinking it sounds more Italian. The Italians I know say o-RIG-an-o.

In “Rocco Schiavone,” the dialogue builds a cadence relying on a dactyl, the poetical foot made up of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones: DUM-da-da, like the end of many Italian words. By contrast, English uses dominantly the iamb – remember iambic pentameter from school? – da-DUM:

i NEED to WRITE a SON-net FOR this CLASS.
i WOR-ry HOW i’ll EV-er FIND the TIME.
i DON’T see HOW i’ll EV-er MAKE a RHYME.
but IF i DON’T i KNOW i’ll NEV-er PASS.*

You get the point – da-DUM, da-DUM.

German, as in Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude,” dominantly uses the trochee: DUM-da. It’s the music of a march. You hear it in Beethoven’s Ninth (and sing along with Schiavone’s phone):

FREUD-e, SCHÖN-e, GÖTT-er FUNK-en. TOCH-ter AUS e-LY-se-UM [hold].

WIR be-TRET-en FEU-er-TRUNK-en, HIMM-lich-E, dein HEI-lich-TUM [hold].

The Italian cadence itself carries a meaning that the English subtitles on “Ice Cold Murders: Rocco Schiavone” can’t convey, but you hear it nonetheless in the spoken words and music. In many cases throughout the series, the two unstressed syllables at the end of so many words, so many sentences, convey a subtle sonic meaning, a sense of uplift from the depths of human experience that the plot explores. Seasons 3 and 4 concern in the foreground problems of gambling addiction. Throughout, organized crime, drugs and money laundering lurk behind. The back story for the entire series, the assassination of the detective’s wife by a crime family. Schiavone has taken the law into his own hands and killed the assassin, deliberately, but in blood that’s certainly not cold. The consequences rattle on eight years later and come to the fore in Season 5.

Yet the cadence of the sentences, the shifts in the scenery, the friendships of the detective with a three friends-cum-fellow law-breakers, all make the abiding message of the series one that’s uplifting.

At the risk of engaging in national stereotyping, it’s akin to a joke I heard a long time ago, when I started living in Europe and paying renewed attention to the shot Buck Gunther fired across my bows. It goes like this:

A German says: This situation is serious, but not impossible (NOT im-POSS-i-BLE [hold]).

An Italian says: This situation is impossible, but not serious (not SER-i-ous).

“Ice Cold Murders: Rocco Schiavone” illustrate how dialogue is also music. It can be – should go without saying – the same in print, too, as Buck’s lesson showed:

Make it SING! (That’s an anapest, by the way, the reverse of dactyl, and also uplifting.)

* It’s a poem of mine, a sonnet of 15 lines, not 14, which is the butt of its own joke. More readably, it starts like this:

Gambling with a License

I need to write a sonnet for this class. 
I worry how I’ll ever find the time. 
I don’t see how I’ll ever make a rhyme, 
But if I don’t I know I’ll never pass. 

I never much liked poems writ en masse.
I wonder if in the end I’ll have to climb
To offering some drunk perhaps a dime ...

Unpublished as yet: “not SER-i-ous” enough for literary journals? Do let me know if you’d like to read the rest!

NB: Shakespeare too wrote a 15-line sonnet. Number 99. His isn’t funny, though.