Lucia Amendola Ranesi was born in Salerno but lives in Rome.
She graduated in Mathematics at the University of Naples.
Author of a textbook on mathematics for middle schools published in several editions by the Felice le Monnier publishing house. In 2002 he wrote several didactic works. In 2010 he published the novel “The striped moon” with the Alfredo Guida publishing house in Naples.
In 2016, with the publishing house “Il Mio Libro”, he published the tale, illustrated by Antonio Carrano, the Twidletetwit.
In 2021 Lucia Amendola Ranesi, again with the publishing house “Il Mio Libro”, published Quattro thirds pi greco rre tre.
The story that the author describes, already written in the radical and obscure language of life, would have remained as unknown as all if, from a large amount of documents, letters, photographs, testimonies and, at the same time, from an equally precious source, memory, Lucia Amendola had not drawn what would become the characters of the book, the beloved wounds, the stigmas guarded with jealousy.
The protagonists are a young man and a woman ten years older than him, but real just like the dead you were born from, and they never leave you. Despite its linearity, writing can only obey the unconscious, forced as it is to talk to missing people. One gets the impression that they are the privileged readers, the concrete ghosts we are talking about, while the rest of us are only marginal spectators of the drama of the obstinate love between Rodolfo and Maria.
The author therefore found herself facing two types of materials, documents, but also her memories, treated in the same way as real certainty, shadows of history modified in the pure generality of the novel, and in the meantime she asks the spectator reader to believe that the opposite happens: that it is the two real subjects of the story, Rodolfo and Maria, who have lived according to the fantastic rhythm of the novel, in the delicate claim that its narrative plots are history, and not interpretations of the same.
Manlio Ciardo, Rodolfo (the writer’s father), Dora, Maria (her mother), uncle Eugenio who “continued to play a piano even under the bombs”, Renato Caccioppoli, his assistant crowned, “a priest who dressed rigidly in cassock “.
Reading “Quattro Terzi Pi Greco Erre Tre” is not only approaching a bewitching sharpness of writing, but also looking at the reverse of a tapestry. This book is written according to a double plot, one stronger and even harsh, that of documents, the other is what is shown in the empty spaces that the author fills, replacing, at times, in her ordering function, the mother.
Somehow, Lucia Amendola also attempted a familiar descent into the Underworld by calling up the beloved ghosts of the dead, prompting them to return, to explain themselves by playing the part she assigned them along the lines that replicated their lives. A life to live again and, this time, without pain. Lucia Amendola does not trace a different path from what the documents say but, within these, she idealizes her characters.
Entities accomplices of a portentous love are the Moon, Vesuvius, Mount Faito and the sea.
“Quattro thirds pi greco erre tre” is not only the narration of a romantic and troubled love story, but it is often proof of history, that of the great events and the lesser one, closer to men, their joys and their tragedies . The novel tells true events, through the memory and documents found by the author, and contains first-hand information on characters who played a leading role in Neapolitan and Italian cultural life in the first half of the 1900s, such as Ettore Majorana and Renato Caccioppoli. In the background are the years of Fascism and World War II, seen through the eyes of the characters who appear in the story and whose letters (sometimes important historical documents) play a major role in the entire novel. The counterpart is the war that will decide the fate of two families.