While being a grandmother seems to have always been a natural continuation to being a mother, becoming a grandfather is now a new situation for men. Until not many years ago, grandfather was almost an honorary title held by those who could be visited by their grandchildren on Sunday, present them with gifts for Christmas and in return be respected and sometimes even feared. In current times, grandfathers have to take care of grandchildren and help the children; in short, to share similar tasks and duties with grandmothers, often without knowing the business.
Francesco Tonucci has been a happy grandfather for many years, as manifested in the extensive letter which opens this book. A tender and passionate letter to his twenty-five-year-old grandson with whom he has learned to be a grandfather and to a few-month-old granddaughter to whom he expects to be able to offer everything that he has discovered on the road. But Francesco Tonucci has a satirical alter ego called Frato, who has chosen to describe, through his peculiar vignettes, various nuances and facets of the delicate, complicated and sometimes ridiculous relationship that exists today between grandchildren and grandparents. It is, of course, another dialogue, in Fratos’s style, which introduces new bonds between parents and children, between grandparents and grandchildren; a dialogue between the memories of a world so different that it could seem a fable and so surprising as new technologies, a dialogue made of complicities, alliances, misunderstandings and conflicts. The result is a sometimes scathing analysis, which does not hide his deep love for the extraordinary figure of the grandfather.
This look is completed with twenty illustrations where the author reveals the secret of simple games, which cost little money, with which he had fun when he was young, with the conviction that today’s supertechnological children - children after all – will enjoy too.