The Castafiore Emerald is the twenty-first volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. It was serialised weekly from July 1961 to September 1962 in Tintin magazine. In contrast to the previous Tintin books, Hergé deliberately broke the adventure formula he had created: it is the only book in the series where the characters remain at Marlinspike Hall, Captain Haddock's family estate, and neither travel abroad nor confront dangerous criminals. The plot concerns the visit of the opera singer Bianca Castafiore and the subsequent theft of her emerald.
Cover of the English edition
The Château de Cheverny in France was used as the basis for Haddock's family estate, Marlinspike Hall or Moulinsart in the original French version.
Hergé biographer Benoît Peeters (pictured, 2010) described The Castafiore Emerald as "the most surprising of Tintin's adventures".
Bianca Castafiore, nicknamed the "Milanese Nightingale", is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. She is an opera singer who frequently pops up in adventure after adventure. While famous and revered the world over, most of the main characters find her voice shrill and appallingly loud, most notably Captain Haddock, who ironically is the object of Castafiore's affections. She also has a habit of mispronouncing everyone's names, with the exception of Tintin and her personal assistants. Castafiore is comically portrayed as narcissistic, whimsical, absent-minded, and talkative, but often shows a more generous and essentially amiable side, in addition to a will of iron.
The "Bianca Castafioreplein", a tiny square along Verversstraat in Amsterdam named for the fictional opera singer Bianca Castafiore, a character in the comic books The Adventures of Tintin.
