In Rosemburgo, everything is pink: the buildings, the streets, the pears, even the inhabitants, who are all tyrannosaurs, but pink from head to toe. Rosalba, too, is a pink tyrannosaur. Pink like the castle she lives in, like her immense garden planted with pink roses, like the streets, trees, and rivers of Rosemburgo, the town she rules. The sovereign's passion for pink is such that all the newborns in her world, from their greenish hues, are dyed pink at birth using a clamp fitted by the sovereign herself. A little scream, and within minutes, everything is uniformly pink again, without distinction. Immersing yourself in Rosalba's universe also means coming to terms with a lexicon designed to dye even the thoughts of her subjects pink. This is how the gendarmes become “rosarmi”, that the “rosa rosemburgensis” colors everything found in the territory of Rosemburgo and that only names like Rosaria, Rosetta and Rosamunda circulate in the city and that Dr. Rosario Rosiello uses his skills as an optician to design special lenses capable of canceling out any chromatic difference.
Everything decided, everything established, everything the same, everything seemingly unchangeable...or is it? One day, or rather one evening, something irreparable happens: without realizing it, Rosalba bites the wrong butt of a newborn baby saurian, and instead of turning a pink identical to all the others, her color takes on a slightly different hue, something no one notices at first. No one except her parents, of course, who are careful not to say anything. Thus, the little saurian, aptly named Violetta, grows up different from everything around her, struggling to camouflage herself and keep her secret from anyone.
This is the opening of The Pink Tyrannosaurus Rex (Caissa Italia, 2026, pp. 58), written by Alessandro Niero, illustrated by Emanuele Benetti, and crafted with a highly readable text to meet the needs of everyone. A humorous and imaginative tale, " The Pink Tyrannosaurus Rex" aims to be a reflection, not banal but accessible to even the youngest children, on what it means to live in a totalitarian dimension, dominated by a single thought .
As the author, Alessandro Niero, said in introducing the book: "I wrote this story over 15 years ago, inspired by a dream my daughter had when she was a child at the time. I teach Russian literature, which has often dealt with how totalitarianism influences a mono-vision of thought. Although the book wasn't initially intended to be this way, I later realized that Rosalba's pink world was a perfect metaphor for how power can push people to adopt a single worldview."
In a monochromatic universe like the one imagined in Niero's book, it's not surprising, as the book states, that "Violetta, over the years, had developed a somewhat difficult character. They called her a grumpy, a resentful, PINK person. They said she wasn't very warm, not very caring, not very loving." All this "PINK" makes her quite sad. Until she makes an eye-opening discovery and begins to no longer be ashamed of her skin. In fact, she even becomes so proud of it that she begins to show off a few purple spots here and there, contemptuous of the danger she's putting herself in. When Violetta's true nature inevitably surfaces, the time is ripe for a revolution... a very colorful one. When Violetta realizes the existence of colors, even words reflect the beauty of variety: so the immaculate white releases light, the warm and intense red seems to boil, and every color seems to have a voice all its own.
Through linguistic acrobatics, telling names, and hilarious narrative twists, Niero displays an imaginative and nuanced style inspired by his work as a poet and translator: "There's a Russian saying that can be translated as 'seeing the world through rose-colored glasses,' which refers to a sweetened and idealized way of perceiving what's happening around us. My profession naturally leads me to dwell on the linguistic component, and I drew inspiration from this saying to have fun playing with words and color in the text." Niero's game shatters the monarch's totalitarian vision and reveals the beauty of a reality that is now impossible to hide. The saur, who simply doesn't want to dye her skin the quintessential "feminine" shade, through her rebellion demonstrates that diversity and uniqueness must be preserved, simply because there's no one color that fits everyone.
