Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there are tante Italie – many Italys. ‘Mine is different to hers, which is different to my mother’s, which is different to my father’s, and so on down the queue,’ she writes. These Italys – of fascismo, of Garibaldi, of emigrants living in Sheffield and Manchester, of 31 dialects – are not far-flung historical oddities confined to documentaries or textbooks but are, in Lenarduzzi’s account, the patchwork story of one family.

Sitting at her Nonna’s (grandmother’s)table with ‘the blinds pulled down against the morning sun and the rest of the family shooed away’, she becomes an ‘archivist of family lore’. Through conversations about things as simple as childhood passions (‘Who was your favourite writer when you were young?’) or as painful as Mussolini’s dictatorship (Lenarduzzi’s grandfather did not oppose the fascist regime; her grandmother claims ‘he didn’t have a choice’), a complicated history of love, immigration and war unravels – and the many Italys it took place in.

The author, in her thirties, is herself ‘50-50 Italian-English’, although she struggles with this ‘biometric, certifiable’ way of looking at her heritage. Movement between Italy and England propels the book. Her Nonna (whose name, Dirce, aptly means ‘cleft’ or ‘dual’) has ‘lived two lives’, with two separate migrations from Italy to England. She first left Maniago, a town in the north-eastern district of Friuli, to move to Sheffield in 1935, when ‘the Great Depression was dragging on’ and Mussolini was solidifying his control. This migration failed when her father, Angelo, died two months later (he is buried in Sheffield’s City Road cemetery). But Dirce left Italy again in 1950, this time for Manchester, and with a husband and child.

These journeys – flawed, difficult and full of the pain of homesickness, something Lenarduzzi believes Italians are ‘particularly susceptible to’ – are the reason for the book’s title. Dandelions, their ‘heads heavy with seeds waiting to catch a breeze, settle and take root’, are a ‘gift of a motif’ when thinking about immigration. Their fragility completes the metaphor: ‘For immigrants, precariousness is always part of the arrangement.’

Lenarduzzi is eloquent when writing about international migration, homecoming and belonging (‘I see it as a process of draining, as though the Italianness is running out of me with every year spent abroad’); but her stories about movements and tensions within Italy itself are even more powerful.

Dandelions is dotted with fragments of the dialects spoken by her family. Her grandfather was trilingual, speaking ‘Friulano with his wife, Veneto with his children and Italian with his grandchildren, who spoke that alone’. In the 1920s, such variety was a ‘direct threat’ to the homogenous Italianatà the fascists believed in. For 20 years, the many ‘mutually unintelligible’ tongues of Italy were suppressed in favour of Italian –a language which, at the time of unification, only 2 per cent of the population spoke.

But Il Duce could not bring himself to leave even this language alone. In 1938, he outlawed the use of lei as a polite version of ‘you’ (akin to vous in French) and replaced it with voi. Sixty years later, and having recently returned to Italy from England, Lenarduzzi’s father is pulled aside at a meeting for still using this fascist-mandated form of address. In the book’s closing pages, the author quotes her Nonna saying: ‘Sono solo parole’ – they are only words. But in Italy it seems nothing could be further from the truth.

Natalia Ginzburg, the Jewish-Italian essayist and novelist who wrote about war-time Italy, hovers over Dandelions. Lenarduzzi quotes her novel-memoir Family Lexicon when talking about family stories – ‘If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave… just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognise each other’ – and there is something selfconsciously novelistic about many passages in the book. When describing her grandparents falling in love, she writes: ‘While Leo and Dirce’s story played out, the Allies invaded Sicily.’ This is not gratuitous flair or a cliché. Lenarduzzi is continually questioning what it means to write a memoir, to package up lives in words and to create a coherent narrative out of ‘deviation and digression’: ‘I wonder about Nonna’s motivations, and my own.’

There are moments when the narrative spills over into self-indulgence – Lenarduzzi even spins a philosophical meditation out of her grandmother’s love of paracetamol – but Dandelions is still an overwhelming success. Just as it describes many Italys, it also encompasses many books, and this unusual combination of family memoir, literary enquiry and political history is a triumph.