From Grandmother to Granddaughter…and Back

On one side Lia Levi, born in 1931, a journalist and a well-established writer. On the other Simone Calderoni, born in 1993, who has recently entered the world of writing. In short, grandmother and grandson who - she armed with a pen, he with a computer - discuss life themes: childhood memories, dreams, games, studies, first steps in work, literature and writing.

This is how “Dear Grandmother, Dear Grandson” (Piemme, 2025, pp. 160, also e-book) was born, a fun and amusing dialogue, halfway between an old-fashioned letter and a crossed class assignment in which the two protagonists express sometimes joking and sometimes tender opinions on the subject of the other . The declared objective: to compare different generations, those who were young in 1920 and those who are young in this first part of the Third Millennium. The underlying objective, but not too much: to get to know each other, to relate even if the differences given by sixty years of life are many and the experiences are very distant.

And yet the dialogue, page after page, takes off, delicately, with the mutual respect given by the awareness of belonging not so much to different times, but to distant stories. Lia Levi was a child in the Italy of fascism and racial laws, she experienced war, but had the opportunity to be an adult in the years in which the economic miracle made our country fly high. Simone Calderoni had a less adventurous childhood and adolescence than his grandmother, but he lives all the insecurities and uncertainties of our time. As Lia and Simone, grandmother and granddaughter, tell each other their stories, they feel their distances deepening a little. Times, discoveries, society and technology have changed. At the same time they deepen their bond, they manage to overcome the boundaries set by concreteness and time. They feel that there is something incalculable and indelible that unites them, something that cancels out a good part of the barriers between them: writing.

Between the lines of Lia's sheets and Simone's digital pages there is a thin thread that unites and brings the two to meet again to travel the same path. Lia Levi then feels that she has somehow passed the torch to her grandson, that she has transmitted the enthusiasm for literature, the emotion that a poem or a special book gives you. Special like this "Dear grandmother, dear grandson".