Inspector Montalbano is an Italian television series produced and broadcast by RAI since 1999, based on the detective novels of Andrea Camilleri. The protagonist is Commissario Salvo Montalbano, and the stories are set in the imaginary town of Vigata, Sicily. In 2012 the series generated a prequel, Il giovane Montalbano.

Fighting a modern, fragmented and brutal Mafia, the Sicilian Anti-Mafia Squad seeks to crush the criminal network that holds a death grip on the region. Sophisticated surveillance helps, unless the enemy lies within.

At the end of the seventies the Red Brigades are plotting a new target to hit, the president of the Christian Democrats Aldo Moro. On 16 March 1978, the band of the Red Brigades went on the attack. The terrorists kidnap Aldo Moro and kill all the men in his escort.

During World War II, 22-year-old Carabinieri deputy brigadier Salvo D'Acquisto makes an heroic gesture of self-sacrifice by "confessing" an act of sabotage for which 22 civilians had been rounded up by the Germans, and is executed by firing squad in their place on September 23, 1943.

Rome is on the thresh-hold of the Holy year 1925, the city wishes to present itself as 'spotless' to the outside world. The appearance of a child's corpse puts an end to these aspirations. The police arrest a small time crook who has committed a robbery but has nothing to do with the murder of the child.