ANASTASIO ATTANASIO ALIAS RICKY IN “TELL ME A STORY!” by F.P.Barbieri

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(NOTE to inverarity68 and anyone else who is interested: while the first story was only a sort of ouverture, here the world-building begins in earnest. Concrit welcome.)

Comments

This may take a while...

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First and foremost, thanks for the attentive and thorough review. I said it before and I'll say it again: the attention of an intelligent reader is a great compliment to any writer. The attention of an intelligent reader who also happens to be a great writer, now -!

Right, then. The premise you find dubious - that the little rural community of Capo Pancrazio ranks among the mightiest wizards in the world - is exactly what I intended. The very name (pan-kration, "all-force") ought to be a warning. It is one example of the immense difficulty that the Italian Ministry has faced since 1860, and to which, before Alberico Attanasio, it had more or less yielded. The Italian wizarding communities are not only numerous and scattered; a few of them are themselves gigantically powerful. (This does not represent any allegory or symbol about real-life Italy; it is a piece of "secondary creation" in the Tolkien sense, producing a world with its own internal consistency. If there was an Italy with the features I have thought up, then a few of its communities would be very powerful indeed.) As for the ineptitude and weakness of the international wizarding community - as my mayor points out, the fact that "only" 39 ministries had subscribed to the action shows that even outside Capo Pancrazio it had caused considerable disagreement. The show of numbers was intended to disguise the fact that some "big players" had not wanted in. And the Ministries were not at their best - just at the end of the Grindelwald bloodletting, which must have bled many of them white. The whole expedition was the result of collective anger and hysteria in the aftermath of the Grindelwald war - not a good foundation.

I also think that the whole moral status of the issue is by no means as clear as you seem to think I made it. I am not "trying to impart" whatever the Mayor wants, any more than you are trying to impart what Dean Grimm or Abraham Thorn say. Both of them can make a good case for their views; and so can the Mayor of Capo Pancrazio. Sure, the Mayor delivers a fine extempore speech - you would expect a Mayor to be able to. Sure, he makes a good case. But if you look at Alberico's position, what he is saying is that the Pancratians are doing what they please because they can. Alberico is very much in two minds - happy that the foreigners have been humiliated, but not that the weakness of national law in Italy has been shown up. He is working in the opposite direction. If the Mayor is right, he is wrong. If the Mayor is wrong, he is right. At least, there are two ways of looking at the matter. And by the same token, the story is not so much about the weather wizards as about the weak and unstable position of the Ministry and of Ricky's own father. It is with his hopeless sense of struggle and exhaustion that it opens and closes.

One thing. I am far from being opposed to the EU. Practically every Italian is pro-European to the bone, even those of us who have problems with individual European policies or decisions. I do however resent the vanity and outright racism of certain north European countries, and I have good reason to. As it happens, my brother is the head of a national NGO who regularly deals with European institutions at the highest levels, and I have heard horror stories about the arrogance and close-mindedness of a number of small countries that regard themselves as the vanguard of mankind. More I do not want to say, but my depiction of certain groups is based on experience.