Serialität im Provinzkrimi. Francesco Guccinis und Loriano Macchiavellis Sanvito-Zyklus

Abstract

Macaronì (1997), the first novel in the series about the investigator Benedetto Santovito, here still a “Maresciallo dei Carabinieri,” already shows the plot pattern of interweaving the ‘big’ history (in this case the fascism of the era in which the plot is set as well as Italian mass emigration since the end of the 19th century, which also plays into the crime plot) with the local history, in which popular myths and tales from the rural Apennine region of Emilia-Romagna are mixed in. The protagonist Santovito ends up in the same village in the Apennines several years apart in the subsequent novels by the author duo Guccini/Machiavelli. This article focuses on aspects of seriality in Macaronì and the two following novels of the duo's ‘Apennine Trilogy:’ Un disco dei Platters (1998), where the changed village culture of the early 1960s is a central theme, and Questo sangue che impasta la terra (2001), where the trail of murders, set in the context of political extremism, also leads to the specific urban atmosphere of Bologna.