Baron Lamberto is very rich - and very ill. He owns 26 banks and has been diagnosed with 26 deadly ailments. Only his butler, Anselmo, remembers them all. On the advice of an Egyptian sage, Lamberto hires an army of servants to repeat his name over and over again. It's a recipe, he's told, for eternal life - and surprisingly it works. But Lamberto's newfound youth is put at risk when a terrorist group lays siege to his private island in the mountains near Lake Orta. The Baron's army of bank directors is held hostage and an international media spectacle starts.

Review
“Gianni Rodari gave free rein to his imagination, with inspired panache and gleeful lightness. At the same time, he had a precise and meticulous love for detail, for rich and exact language, and so all of his inventions are set in a very concrete world with real form and action.”
—Italo Calvino

"Making a comedy out of a terrorist kidnapping is tricky stuff, but this book for both children and adults is a daring highwire act that works. In the shocking tradition of Roald Dahl, this hilarious Italian fairytale is peppered with scuba diving suits, submachine guns and custom sports cars. At times antic with goofy buffoonery, at times grisly with uncomfortable realism—Rodari has a sense of comedy that smacks of the Marx Brothers, but with a darker, post 9/11 edge more in keeping with the grimmer satires of South Park."
"—Shelf Awareness"