Peppinella, a grandmother with the features of an archaic goddess, is the protagonist of Emanuele Trevi's short novel entitled Mia nonna e il Conte (My Grandmother and the Count, Solferino, 2025, pp. 128, also e-book).
Peppinella is a peremptory Calabrian matriarch who, like a queen, lives revered by two ladies-in-waiting—Delia and Carmelina—but like any common woman, watches The Bold and the Beautiful in the afternoons. In her garden, her grandson Emanuele spends the endless summers of his youth, immersed in books. Emanuele reads and observes his grandmother, who seems to undergo an incredible transformation with the passing of time: "Like certain girls so shy and retiring as to seem anonymous, who reveal their charm at the right moment, in the space of a summer, at sixteen or eighteen, beginning to shine like stars newly discovered in the sky, my grandmother became beautiful after eighty," writes Trevi. And it is in this late summer of her life that one fine day Peppinella sees a Count appear before her, also in his eighties and a scholar of Bourbon history, who offers her a bouquet of flowers and asks permission to cross his property, shortening the journey from home to the village. Passage after passage, day after day, greeting after greeting, an unexpected affection blossoms between Peppinella and the Count, belated, free of anxiety and pretension, unselfish. Emanuele thus becomes an attentive witness to their affection, which the two experience with sweet unawareness, "as if they were locked in a crystal ball, guarding an inaccessible secret, the formula of a spell of which both, unknowingly, possessed the half necessary to complete the other." It is no coincidence that Trevi writes, in Mia Nonna e il Conte (My Grandmother and the Count), restoring and transfiguring a family narrative suspended between the everyday and the eternal, woven with a poignant sense of time.
We asked Emanuele Trevi what motivated him to write a novel so full of intimacy and wit:
"The things I talk about in my books come to me at a certain point, I focus on them, and if I feel like I can tell them in an interesting way, I start writing. Not everything you remember is interesting to readers; you have to think about yourself from the outside, so to speak. I think this also applies to works of fiction, with which I don't have much direct experience."
What kind of character is Peppinella, how could we define her?
"She's a character bound to the narrator by a deep love, an atavistic and irrational family love, as often happens in Southern families, but perhaps the same thing happens all over the world. I wanted to give her the appearance of a kind of queen, or rather, a housewife goddess, a protective figure."
What kind of relationship develops between you and the Count?
"I'm talking about love, a love born in the final twilight of life, when people generally no longer expect anything. However you define it, theirs is a relationship that produces a miracle: if they can't stop time, they can create the illusion of slowing it down, and this illusion becomes their reality."
How does the young nephew Emanuele look at this relationship?
"At twenty, the grandson looks at his grandmother and the Count as two human prodigies, because at his age, romantic relationships are much more complicated and ultimately unhappy, filled with feelings of inadequacy, unexpressed needs, projections, and jealousies. Old people envy young people, but they've forgotten how difficult it is to be young."
Does love really have no age?
"It's always difficult for me to draw a general rule from the things I write, because they concern real, unique, and unrepeatable people, and nothing universal can be drawn from their fate. However, regarding your question, I've met many people who fell in love after 80."