Grandparents have a key role as childcare providers all over Europe. However, mid-life individuals are likely to be still in employment when they become grandparents, which might conflict with their role of care providers since both activities require time and energy. Several studies have already shown that grandparenthood is associated with early retirement, whereas the relation between the transition to grandparenthood and labour market participation has been overlooked in Southern Europe. We employ Italy as a case study, for its peculiar familialistic welfare regime. Public childcare services are scarcely provided, making grandparents a very important source of support for the youngest generations; at the same time, mothers are very housewives, lessening the need for grandparental childcare. For preliminary analyses, we use two rounds of the Italian Multipurpose Survey Families and Social Subjects (2003, 2009). Through Kaplan-Meier survivor functions, we show that grandparenthood does not overlap with employment in Italy. Moreover, with fixed-effects models, we find that grandparenthood only weakly increases the probability to early retire. With forthcoming 2016 data, we will compare birth cohorts in the probability to retire after the grandchild birth, because pension reforms have made early retirement options increasingly less common for older Italian workers.