Nice, did you get the inspiration from Andrea Camilleri's novel "The Shape of Water" (La forma dell'acqua)?
I am insufficiently well-read, sadly. Montalbano was filmed for TV in Italian and shown over here with subtitles. I tried a couple but it didn't really grab me. For detective stories set in Italy, I've found nothing to beat Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels. He's a Venetian working in Rome, but he gets about a bit: one of them (Vendetta, from memory) was set in Sicily.
Jeremy