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 (such as "Hammock", "Paddock", and "Fatstock" for Haddock), 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. Her given name means "white" (feminine) in Italian, and her surname is Italian for "chaste flower". She first appeared in 1939, but from the 1950s, Hergé partially remodelled her after the Greek soprano Maria Callas. Character history The comical Italian opera diva first appears in King Ottokar's Sceptre, and is also in The Seven Crystal Balls, The Calculus Affair, The Castafiore Emerald, The Red Sea Sharks, Tintin and the Picaros, and would have appeared in the unfinished Tintin and Alph-Art. She is played on radio in Land of Black Gold and in Tintin in Tibet, Captain Haddock imagines her singing in Flight 714 to Sydney, and mentions her famous aria in Destination Moon. Although she is apparently one of the leading opera singers of her generation, the only thing that Castafiore is ever heard to sing are a few lines of her signature aria, "The Jewel Song" (l'air des bijoux, from Gounod's Faust), always at ear-splitting volume (and violent force—certainly enough to part the Captain's hair, shatter glasses and a breeze enough to blow back a curtain in an opera box—"She's in fine voice tonight."). When on tour, she usually travels with her piano accompanist, Igor Wagner, and her maid, Irma. At odds with her reputation as a leading opera singer, in The Seven Crystal Balls, she appears third on the bill of a variety show, following a genuine clairvoyant act and a knife thrower (revealed to be General Alcazar), and preceding a magician. She is depicted as a preening, melodramatic diva, although she has a kind heart. In The Calculus Affair, for example, she provides a diversion to distract the sinister Colonel Sponsz so that Tintin and Captain