“Migrants are a social bomb that risks exploding,” said Silvio Berlusconi in 2018. Since then, rightwing populism has cemented its foothold in Europe and, following the success of Sweden’s far right, Giorgia Meloni swept to victory in Italy’s recent general election. The country’s first female prime minister will lead a right-wing coalition comprising Brothers of Italy, her own post-fascist party, which has increased its share fivefold since 2018, together with Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigrant League and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
Into this charged political climate comes Thea Lenarduzzi’s skilful debut Dandelions, in which the titular weed symbolises migrants: tenacious, pervasive, marginalised. A family memoir and social history with echoes of Natalia Ginzburg’s autobiographical novel Family Lexicon, which explores the evocative power of shared language and stories, Dandelions traces four generations of migration between Italy and England. It sensitively examines the experience through the lens of Italians arriving in 1950s Britain, Britons emigrating to 1980s Italy, and Lenarduzzi’s own move to England in 2004 — although she’s much more guarded about the third.
Lenarduzzi grew up in Italy, her English mother and Italian father having moved there from London in 1981, during the anni di piombo (years of lead), a period of far-left and far-right political terrorism spanning the late 1960s to the late 1980s. To write Dandelions, she interviewed her Italian grandmother Dirce, a seamstress based in the north-eastern industrial town of Maniago. What emerges is a first-person account of a working-class family caught between cultures and marked by premature loss, mediated by Lenarduzzi, who is haunted by questions about her ancestors’ politics. If her great-grandfather Angelo was a fascist, she wonders, “would I still want to tell his story and bind it so closely with my own?”
Her grandmother’s childhood was blighted by Angelo’s abrupt death in 1935, at the age of 33, two months after he moved his family to England. At home, Mussolini was waging war on the Great Depression, but opportunity beckoned London-born Angelo to Manchester. Four months after his death, nine-year-old Dirce, her mother and her brother returned to Maniago, avoiding the hostility towards “enemy aliens” that would plague Italians in Britain after Italy joined the second world war in 1940.
In 1950, before the Marshall Plan had ignited Italy’s postwar miracolo economico, 24-year-old Dirce felt her father calling her to Sheffield, his burial place. She relocated from Maniago to this “promised land” with her mother, son and husband Leonardo, a skilled foreign worker of the kind being courted by the Ministry for Labour’s Official Italian Scheme, which aimed to boost Britain’s industrial workforce. She only returned reluctantly to Maniago in 1971, when Leo’s heart faltered after years spent laying terrazzo flooring. England felt like home to Dirce from the age of nine. “But Italy was home, too. Always both.”
As if scattering dandelion seeds, Lenarduzzi writes discursively in precise, metaphorical prose, layering family mythology with fascinating political, economic and social context. This includes the lives of women such as Liala, the “Italian Barbara Cartland”, and Giuseppina Raimondi, whose marriage to Giuseppe Garibaldi lasted under an hour, before her alleged infidelity caused the groom to launch a smear campaign against her.
At a pivotal moment when “but Mussolini also did good things” is murmured across Italy, Lenarduzzi’s reckoning with her heritage highlights the way history reverberates in the present. Her timely investigation of Italian identity and fascist legacy illuminates the roots of nationalism the world over.
Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi, Fitzcarraldo Editions £12.99, 288 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café
