IT 153, Prof. Brancaccio
January 25 th , 2012
Andrea Camilleri’s Two Sleepers
Andrea Camilleri weaves the ancient legend of the Seven Sleepers into his Inspector Montalbano novel, The Terra-Cotta Dog , in ways that are not always obvious. When Montalbano and his crew open up the cave of Crasticeddru, they discover two corpses arranged in the middle of a jug, a bowl, and a terra-cotta dog, symbols that relate directly to the sleepers’ legend. The most basic similarity between the two stories is that the bodies, like the sleepers, were trapped inside a cave for a significant amount of time, after which the cave was reopened and the imprisoned were suddenly in a world, changed by time, in which they no longer fit. The legend of the Seven
Sleepers is set at the beginning of Christianity, but by setting the death of the two lovers near the end of World War II, Camilleri presents an interpretation of the legend through the lens of Italian history. Of course, the largest discrepancy between the two stories is that Lisetta and her lover do not awake like the seven sleepers. Instead, Camilleri metaphorically resurrects the two: as the plot progresses, Montalbano and his colleagues bring life to the fifty-year-old corpses by figuring out and spreading their love story.
In both the legend of the Seven Sleepers and The Terra-Cotta Dog , the detail which indicates that the sleepers/corpses are from another time is the kind of coins found with them. The amount of time the seven sleepers spend in their cave is not consistent among the retellings of the legend; however, in each story, the sleepers awake in a world very different from the one they remember, though they believe they have slept for only a short time. The sleepers are mysterious to the public because of the outdated coins they try to use to buy food. El Madani, an Arab who tells
Inspector Montalbano the story of the sleepers, explains, “The one sent on this mission [to buy food] is betrayed by the fact that the coins are…no longer current” (269). The same sign of time discrepancy alerts Montalbano (confirmed by an expert in ancient coins) to the age of the corpses found in the cave. The coins left beside the corpses were minted in the 1930s and early 1940s, but Montalbano notes the images on the coins and the C’s that mark them as centesimi (172).
The old expert in coins affirms that the coins from the cave went out of circulation in October of
1943 (175). Had the corpses awoken to the contemporary world, they would have found their currency useless and any attempts to use it would have alerted others to their unique situation.
With this very specific, tangible detail, Camilleri creates a link between “The Seven Sleepers” and Montalbano’s crime scene, allowing other parallels between them to surface and divergences to become more obvious.
Camilleri uses “The Seven Sleepers” as a basis for this Montalbano case, but The Terra-Cotta
Do g is certainly not a straight retelling. Camilleri’s novel is set in contemporary times, and the integral issues of the legend are not exactly applicable to the 1900s. Although there are many retellings of “The Seven Sleepers,” the original is a Christian legend by the name of “The Seven
Sleepers of Ephesus,” according to El Madani (270). In this story, the emperor Decius buries seven Christian noble men alive in a cave in order to “enforce his laws against Christians,” and they awake to find themselves in a Christian empire led by a different emperor.
The turmoil

surrounding the legend is caused by the emergence of Christianity and the tensions it created.
Camilleri does not make religion a focus in the novel. Instead, the chaos that surrounded the death of the lovers is that of World War II. To use the coins as a concrete example, the legend has the coins minted with the face of an old emperor, while in Camilleri’s novel, Montalbano notes that one of the coins is emblazed with ‘“XX,” [meaning] year twenty of the Fascist era’
(172). Even more directly, Lisetta’s lover is “a sailor from the
Pacinotti
” (321) and the lovers die during an American bombing of Sicily. Camilleri slips Italian history into his story, interweaving it with the legend of the Seven Sleepers and making a distinction between the legend and history by not only using a vivid and relatively current historical event, but also by bringing in a character who is still alive to tell the tale.
Camilleri structures the novel in a very specific way: he reveals information about the lovers as
Inspector Montalbano receives it, not any sooner (though occasionally Montalbano has a sudden realization that is not revealed to the reader, explained only when he recounts it aloud to a colleague). Thus, the reader collects many chunks of information, but is given little guidance as to how to organize them. Camilleri offers few complete tellings of Lisetta and Mario’s story, waiting until the very end of the novel to present the complete story with all of the details.
Although Montalbano has all of the information in his mind and feels he has a good grasp of the story, even he is dependent on the only living participant of the event, Lillo Rizzitano, for the particulars. “Excuse me,” Lillo interrupts during Montalbano’s attempt to recount the story, “but that’s not what happened. And I remember everything, down to the smallest details” (321). In the last ten pages of the novel, Camilleri presents, through the voice of Lillo Rizzitano, the only source with all of the pertinent information, the story of Lisetta and Mario in its entirety – the completed puzzle.
Inspector Montalbano discovers the bodies of Lisetta and Mario fifty years after their deaths; unlike those of the sleepers in the legend, these bodies have not been sleeping and do not wake up. However, throughout his investigation, Montalbano does succeed in bringing a kind of metaphorical life to the dead lovers. When he first stumbles upon the couple, all Montalbano sees are “two dead bodies, all shriveled up as in a horror film, embracing” (140). Upon closer inspection, Montalbano is able to tell that one body is male, the other female, and that the male was shot in the head (141-143). From Dr. Pasquano’s autopsies, Montalbano learns that the lovers were both “killed by gunshot wounds” while they were asleep together, approximately fifty years ago (155). Piece by piece, Montalbano gathers more information about the two corpses, the Crasticeddru cave, and the history surrounding the deaths of the lovers, putting together a puzzle that ultimately results in a tale of two lovers, Lisetta Moscato and Mario
Cunich, and their double murder. Montalbano is able to return to the faceless corpses their names, their emotions, their pasts, and their story. When Lillo Rizzitano tells this story in full at the end of the novel, Lisetta and Mario become active characters again, particularly because both the tale of Lisetta and Mario and the novel itself are told in the past tense. Camilleri blurs the line between past and present, allowing Lisetta and Mario to come to life: “Lisetta remained calm because her Mario was with her,” Rizzitano tells Montalbano (324). When Rizzitano comes to his discovery of the lovers’ bodies, he says, “There were Mario and Lisetta, naked, clutching one another, in a sea of blood. They must have been making love…and then embraced

each other like that out of fear” (326). Rizzitano’s description of finding the two bodies is full of life, despite the literal lack of it. The characters names, rather than “two dead bodies” (140), and the vivid verbs – “clutching,” “making love” (326) – bring Lisetta and Mario to life. By placing
Rizzitano’s detailed account at the climax of the novel, Camilleri completes Montalbano’s quest to discover the story of the dead lovers and brings a certain life to the corpses that was certainly not present upon their first introduction.
Camilleri uses the legend of the Seven Sleepers in several ways throughout The Terra-
Cotta Dog . As a basis for his crime scene, he takes details from the many version of the story and employs them in a very similar, though modernized, way, as in the case with the coins. He changes the historical setting of the original legend to reflect Italian history and makes the context of the story as part of a crime scene more feasible. Even though Camilleri’s modernization of “The Seven Sleepers” requires that his sleepers are dead, he does not lose the sense of resurrection that is so important in the original story: Camilleri restores life to the corpses of two lovers.

Works Consulted
Fortescue, Adrian. "The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5.
New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. 24 Jan. 2012 <http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/05496a.htm>.
Mackenzie, Donald A. "Introduction." Introduction. Teutonic Myth and Legend: An
Introduction to the Eddas & Sagas, Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, Etc.
London: Gresham
Pub., 1912. Google Books . Kessinger Publishing, 15 Oct. 2004. Web. 24 Jan. 2012.
<http://books.google.it/books?id=3QJ9sX7s7aoC&pg=PR44&lpg=PR44&dq=the+seven
+sleepers+legend+Italian&source>