- recurring idea: occult secret service, a la Laundry, but Italian
- ITALY has a;ways been a territorial continuum of intermixed parasocieties
- church
- Organized criminality
- Masons
- The State at various levels of influence/fascism
- The Catholic Church
- Clans, families
- Languages and territory
- Little regard for law but strong regard for hierarchy and deference, or violent strife/economic domination
- Occult societies not only fit right in there, they are even likely to re,aim occult
- There are real occult societies with real loci of power in ITALY (masonic lodges)
- What power would a fictional set of occult parasocieties have?
- fragmented territorially, b worship, by ideology, by access to mundane or occult power, by blood or chosen-family ties (like organized crime)
- Intermix with other parasocieties' constraints: maybe partly absorbed in other mundane occult structures like eg GLADIO/stay-behind successors, organized crime, etc
- Idea: this may mean that powerful occult parasocieties have just infiltrated other orgs and so they aren't visible power-wise just because the more overt org functions as cover/allows them access to additional power
- Idea: doctrina fidei (ex-inquisition) still has the same role, it just is the Catholic Church's enforcement arm to maintain/enforce lay power vs occult societies
- Eg can't enter holy ground not because of supernal reason but because churches are actively 'blessed' (warded) so they can in a pinch serve as bases for attacks/safe-houses vs occult parasocieties
- synopsis idea: "After a hit goes wrong, the Italian secret services are forced by international pressure and by internal blackmail to absorb disparate cells of occult operatives into a new structure, Detachment Seventeenth, with a more formal mandate to police occult activities within the territory (counterespionage). Suddenly, people who have lived a life relatively free of constraints are now pressed to uphold their oaths, work toward their own goals and obligations — be them with blood row chosen family, with the crime families that have protected them, with the gods and powers-that-be that litter the Penonsula — with virtual conscription into a bureaucratic power structure that is however not free of allies and opportunities. And while this bubbles over, events may show that upheavals bigger than any one nation are about to be at hand…"
- bureaucratic action has to balance with the needs of real-world espionage agency (Laundry, GitS: SAC) meets typically italian nero/crime stories (Camilleri)