"No one here ever cared about being the prettiest in the kingdom. But we are fascinated by villains. And villains even more."

As children, we didn't look to fairy tales for the thrill of the scary, but we wanted to learn to recognize courage, to see intelligence at work, cunning, luck helping the brave, overcoming violence, injustice, bullying, and pettiness. We wanted escapism, of course, entertainment, but so much more.
In those restless years of adjusting to new dimensions and balances, Silvia Ballestra began to buy children's books. She did it to return "home". To poetry, to beauty, to great themes and ideas, to creativity at work, to experimentation, to unexpected waste: all things that are increasingly rare to experience. And so the idea was born to spend a whole night in the fairy tale house. In the dark and alone, Silvia Ballestra wandered into the rooms of the Brothers Grimm, the Grimmwelt in Kassel, Germany. No magic formulas were necessary. What came to life was the entire building, with its ghosts, its stories, its voices, and above all, its words. For it is the words that lead us into a universe populated by women, anonymous and otherwise, writers and oral storytellers: their hands and voices are powerful.