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Rating: Once upon a time there was Baron Lamberto or The Mysteries of the Island of San Giulio is another of those works in which Gianni Rodari revisits, flirts, and courts with the fairy tale genre.
The initial idea comes from a geographical observation. You must know that the emissary of Lake Orta is an exceptional river: the Nigoglia. The capricious Nigoglia defies the laws of physics, flows out from the northern shore of the lake, and flows up the Alps; the inhabitants of Omegna have dedicated a motto to the capricious river which says more or less:
La Nigoja la va in su
e la legg la forma nu
The Nigoglia is to the laws of rivers as this story is to the laws of fairy tales.
Wherever has a fairy tale been read in which the protagonist, Lamberto, is a very wealthy baron of ninety-four years, afflicted by twenty-four illnesses with more wrinkles on his forehead than years on his back?
Let’s leave the setting aside for a moment. Keep it aside, perhaps we need something else to understand...
Now try to think of the story as a game. How many stories have been written to answer the question, "What would happen if something improbable happened in a place...?"
What would happen if everyone went blind, Cecità, what would happen if upon waking up your body had become that of a huge cockroach, The Metamorphosis…
And now what would happen if it were true, as the Arab sages say, that the man whose name is spoken remains alive?
The protagonist of our story, who is unbelievably rich (he owns twenty-four banks worldwide), decides to believe in this lore and see how it goes. So he hires six people, treats them like pashas, to repeat his name in shifts. Twenty-four hours a day.
Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto...
Initially skeptical, the baron begins to rejuvenate, and then?
What will happen to the baron, to our local Benjamin Button? How will the six employees react to such a senseless job? And the nephew, the sole heir, waiting for his decrepit uncle's death to clear his debts, what will he decide to do?
What might seem like a personal whim of an eccentric wealthy man will have significant consequences... for everyone.
In short, the book is almost all here (A second time?): a river that flows up a mountain, an old man who rejuvenates…
...decide for yourself where they will end up, there will be neither mouth nor source in this tale; instead, by reading the book, you will swim upstream, see the banks and shores, the meanders, the water becoming a river, stream, and waterfall.
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