page_title: Bianca Castafiore
section_title: Character background and influences
hierarchical_section_title: Bianca Castafiore / Character background and influences
caption_attribution_description: 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.
context_page_description: Bianca Castafiore, 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 aggravates particularly Captain Haddock as she pops up in adventure after adventure. Castafiore is comically portrayed as narcissistic, whimsical, absent-minded, and talkative, and seems unaware that her voice is shrill and appallingly loud. She is also wealthy, generous and essentially amiable, and has a will of iron.
  Her first name means "white" in Italian, and her surname is Italian for "chaste flower". She first appeared in 1939, but since the 1950s, Hergé has partially remodelled her after the Greek soprano Maria Callas.
context_section_description: Opera was one of Hergé's pet peeves. "Opera bores me, to my great shame. What's more, it makes me laugh," Hergé admitted. And so, perhaps not surprisingly, he created an archetypical singer who makes the reader laugh.
  Though la Castafiore is obviously Italian, her pet aria is from a French opera (Faust was composed by Charles Gounod) rather than the Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, or Donizetti one might have expected from a star of La Scala. Faust, and this aria in particular, was among the most famous of all operas in Hergé's time. Furthermore, the choice of this aria is intentionally comic. Hergé depicts the busty, aging, glamorous and utterly self-absorbed opera diva as Marguerite, the picture of innocence, taking delight in her own image in the mirror, with the often repeated quote: Ah, I laugh to see myself so beautiful in this mirror!. 
  Bianca Castafiore is portrayed by Kim Stengel in the 2011 film The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, which merges plots from several books. Renée Fleming provided the singing voice. Although Sra. Castafiore invariably sings her signature aria in Hergé's books, in the film, the character presents a different aria, "Je veux vivre..." from Gounod's Romeo et Juliette.  Oddly, the lead-in (played by an invisible orchestra) is the introduction to yet another coloratura aria, "Una voce poco fa", from Rossini's Barber of Seville.
  The asteroid 1683 Castafiore, discovered in 1950, is named after the character.
  Bianca Castafiore is said to have been inspired by Hergé's own grandmother – Hergé believed that his father was the illegitimate son of the Belgian king Leopold II, but only his grandmother could have known the truth. He added subtle references such as operas that Bianca sang, referring to such stories.
caption: 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.
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