Bianca Castafiore

Bianca Castafiore (Italian pronunciation: [ˈbjaŋka kastaˈfjoːre]), nicknamed the "Milanese Nightingale" (French: le Rossignol milanais), is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. She is an opera singer who frequently appears in the comics. Although she is 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 an iron will. 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.