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As you know, Giacomo's mother was murdered with a musical instrument (an English horn), which at first appeared to be inexplicable to detective Moretti. Eventually, he connected the fact with the rhyme and inferred that the murderer made use of a musical instrument on account of a childish misunderstanding: a child may well have identified the instrument mentioned in the rhyme with a musical instrument, he thought. So far so good. The point is that this inference only makes sense with the English version of the nursery rhyme, where we have:
Morning at two - the rooster's cock-a-doodle-doo.
The instrument for this fine song makes the pleasure nice'n'long.
The corresponding lines in the Italian version are:
Due del mattino - ora tocca al gallo.
Usa bene il suo strumento, per la morte è un godimento.
Which literally translates as:
Morning at two - now it's the rooster's turn.
(He) uses his instrument well, for death it is a pleasure.
Unlike in the English version, here "instrument" is not related to "song", nor to any other elements which may lead a reader (of any age) to think of a musical instrument. And, as you can see yourself, the general context of the rhyme does not favour at all such an interpretation. This makes Moretti's above deduction somewhat far-fetched (on the basis of the Italian rhyme).
On the other hand, one wonders what the "instrument" alluded to by the (fictious) author of the rhyme (the dwarf) actually is. It seems pretty clear (not to say obvious) to me that the instrument with which the "song"/rhyme is written is the pen.
That the farmer killed the rooster with a pen must be rejected out of hand, however. I'd rather think of a feather. Probably, the author (the dwarf/Asia) subtly played with the ambivalent nature of this item: it is well-known that feathers were once used as pens (note that "penna" in Italian means both "pen" and "feather").
Therefore, the instrument used by the farmer to kill the rooster may well be a feather plucked from the tail of the bird itself; the farmer then sticks it into the rooster's head, probably through its eyes. Note that the feathers of the tail (of the rooster/cock) are pointed and strong enough for that scope (they can indeed be used as pens!).
Now, it is also clear that killing a rooster in such a bizarre way takes some time, and in fact the second part of the line tells us that the pleasure deriving from this operation is not only "nice", but also "long". It is conceivable that, once grown up, the murderer realized the oversight he had made years before and took advantage of the favourable circumstances in the case of his meeting with the park-car attendant to put into action the murderous technique suggested by the rhyme: the attendant is in fact repeatedly stabbed in the head with the pen and not with some other weapon his murderer certainly had at that moment.
There is a further (though less important) passage where the Italian version of the rhyme does not match the English one: in the former, "kitty" is drowned because she scratched the farmer ("poiché lo ha graffiato"; note that in the film "kitty" actually scratched her murderer's neck), whereas in the latter "just for a whim".
One last point (independent of the above): the link between the rooster (It. "gallo") of the nursery rhyme and Giacomo's mother lies in the family name of the woman, which is "Gallo", a common Italian family name. One then wonders how such a connection will be made possible in the English/American edition of the film, since "rooster" is not, as far as I know, an English family name.
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Giallo
(pronounced 'djallo, plural gialli) is an italian 20th century genre of literature and film, which in italian indicates crime fiction and mystery. In the English language, however, it is used in a broader meaning that is closer to the french fantastique genre, including elements of horror fiction and eroticism.
The word giallo is Italian for "yellow" and stems from the origin of the genre as a series of cheap paperback novels with trademark yellow covers.
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