Italy’s Red-Hot Cop in Freezing Murders – Anderson Valley Advertiser

The British have them, the French have them, the Swedes and the Poles have them. All Europeans have cop shows and police procedurals that reflect their national identity, many of them on Netflix, PBS and Amazon and available to binge-watch. I have watched a dozen or so of these shows and have come to the conclusion that no one does crime, its detection and its punishment as well as the Italians. They have a lot of history and legend to draw on, going back to Dante and continuing through the Borges and the Mafia.

Montalbano —which follows the pursuits of a pasta-loving Sicilian cop and a wide cast of quirky characters—held my attention for several seasons. Most recently, my favorite series was Rocco Schavone: Ice Cold Murders, set in and around the isolated mountain town of Aosta, where corpses are frozen solid; 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 group of quirky police officers. Powerfully and with nuance played by the experienced Italian actor Marco Giallini, Rocco carries the show on his own shoulders and with his unusual intelligence that makes him an appealing 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 for taking the law into his own hands and brutally attacking a serial rapist of teenage girls and the son of a man of power and influence.

Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Rocco, or “Roc” as his friends call him, does not use cocaine. He arrests cocaine dealers and traffickers, some of whom have connections with high-ranking political figures in the Italian government. Rocco’s drugs of choice are tobacco and marijuana, which he smokes constantly in his own office, in his car and on the streets of Acosta, a real town on the border with France.

Rocco rolls his own joints from the stash he keeps in the top drawer of his desk. He does little to hide his habits, though he does open a window that looks out onto snow-capped mountains and lets in the clean, cold mountain air. “Fuck you,” he tells friends and foes alike.

Rocco works both sides of the street and has no illusions about himself. “I’m an asshole,” he says in one of the first episodes. He upholds the law and breaks it in his tireless efforts to bring justice and revenge for the cold-blooded murder of his wife. Almost everything he does on the job is both personal and political. The show, based on the novels of Antonio Mancini, largely abstains from moral and ethical judgments, which in my eyes makes it considerably superior to the American police procedurals that flood the network; bad programming drives out good programming.

Mancini’s critical intelligence and creativity underpin the plots and subplots, and energize the crisp dialogue. His cop quotes Shakespeare and Hegel, enjoys pizza and white wine, and borrows liberally from Dante and his 14th-century narrative poem, Inferno, which translates as “hell.”

When Rocco beats up a suspect and gives him a handkerchief to wipe the blood from his face, he doesn’t do it out of kindness, but to obtain a DNA sample from the man so it can be analyzed in a lab using the latest technology.

Rocco doesn’t fight crime alone, he fights with the help of judges, coroners, prosecutors, fellow cops, and even hipster criminals who support him as he supports them. The hipster underworld figures even dig up a grave where they hid the body of a man Rocco shot to protect him from prosecution.

Rocco doesn’t carry a gun, but when he needs one, he finds one in his right hand and pulls the trigger. A friend takes the gun away from him to keep him from putting a bullet in his head. And ending his life. He should go to 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 he saves from himself and sets straight.

He also leads a group of illegal immigrants from Mali through the snow and ice to a safe haven.

Unlike Detective Montalbano, Rocco is not physically attractive; his deeply lined face reflects his deeply troubled soul, but women, including an investigative journalist, find him sexually attractive and take him to bed to fuck him senseless. The on-screen sex can be both steamy and comical, especially on one notable occasion when a woman fucks him so hard that she inadvertently bursts the stitches he has received to tend to a gunshot wound accidentally inflicted by a subordinate. No woman receives his loving embrace. His dog, Lupa, who follows him everywhere, is the only living and sentient being who brings out his tenderness and love.

If you haven’t seen Rocco in action, you might want to catch it on PBS. The show, all five seasons with nearly two dozen episodes, is designed to be watched or savored slowly, one at a time. I like Rocco, although I’ve never liked cops, not since cops beat me to a pulp and charged me with attempted murder of a police officer and criminal anarchy. I was protesting the cold-blooded murders, by police officers, of two Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, as they slept 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 killing Black Panthers. After all, he’s a friend of the poor, widows, illegal immigrants from Africa, retirees, and pensioners.