Did you ever read a book by Giovanni Guareschi? If you did not, you do not know what you are missing!
I read a lot in my very early years, starting at four years old. It was some years later that I found out Guareschi’s irresistible Don Camillo !
At the time, TV Tupi a Brazilian TV Channel, was presenting “Don Camillo’s little world”, starring Italian actor Otelo Zeloni as Don Camillo and Brazilian actor Heitor de Andrade as Peppone .
Delightful! The town was smaller, then, and everybody knew everybody(I live in Santos, located in São Vicente island, southeast of São Paulo State, Brazil). In the morning, people used to comment about the chapter of the previous night.
Don Camillo’s funny dialogues with Jesus were wonderful, and Peppone’s tirades and hilarious feats are unforgettable.
Here is something about Giovanni Guareschi and his books. I found a wonderful site (the Url is in the foot of the issue, in Source). The owner only identifies himself as “don Camillo’s fan”. And he says that there is a Yahoo group for Giovanni Guareschi’s fans. Everybody can join.
Enjoy this issue, it is very interesting.
Bellatryx
Giovannino Guareschi: Early years
Born on May 1, 1908 in the Northern Italian village of Fontanelle di Roccabianca, Giovannino Guareschi was the son of a schoolteacher mother and an entrepreneur father. One has to smile at the fact that this child who would grow up to become such a well-known opponent of the Left should have made his debut on a May Day. Indeed, as Winthrop Sargeant recounts in a 1952 Life magazine feature on Guareschi:
“At the time when [Giovannino] first saw the light in a small bedchamber in the building that [also] housed the Socialist party headquarters, a huge party rally was taking place in the street below…. Overcome with the drama of Nino’s birth on so auspicious an occasion, the Socialist leader [Giovanni Faraboli] rushed into the bedchamber and held the newborn infant in the window for the crowd to see. ‘The champion of the workers is born,’ he cried, amid frenzied applause from the workers below.”
The irony there is worthy of one of Guareschi’s own stories (and the episode is faintly echoed in the first of the Don Camillo films, when Mayor Peppone steps out on his balcony and presents his newborn son to a crowd of cheering townspeople assembled below, proclaiming, “Another comrade!”).
Young Giovannino, because of his mother’s job, spent much time during his formative, pre-school years in the care of his mother’s grandmother. From her, the future storyteller later said, he learned many of the stories of the people of his Po River valley region. Then his formal schooling began at age 6, and things went well until 1918, when his father decided that the promising student should become a naval engineer.
Giovannino was enrolled in the Royal Technical School where, he would say, “I had a terrible time understanding what the instructors were teaching, on account of the fact that I had absolutely no interest in technical studies.” After a difficult two years, his parents changed tacks and enrolled him in grammar school for a liberal arts education. It was here that Guareschi shone, studying classics and becoming a top student at the school.
Unfortunately, his secondary education would be interrupted by the severe economic hard times experienced by his family (and many others) under Mussolini’s regime in the 1920’s. This culminated in a financial crash in 1926 during which the family went bankrupt. Giovannino, who had been a boarding pupil at his school, returned home to help his family by working. He eventually finished high school as a day student and began studies at the University of Parma, but he finally left there without a degree, holding a series of odd jobs before establishing himself as a writer.
Milan and the War
Success found him in Milan, where his way with words and skill with pen and ink took him from contributor to staff member to editor of the weekly paper Bertoldo. These were the 1930’s and early ’40’s, days of heavy censorship by the Fascist government, so there was no question of Guareschi’s yet becoming known for the overt political satire which would be his ultimate forte. Under the circumstances of the times, however, the commentary in some of his New Yorker-esque cartoons and humorous articles for Bertoldo would have to be considered remarkably biting. Meanwhile, outside the paper, the busy writer produced a variety of other published works during these years, from a comic book to several novels (two of which were eventually translated into English).
It was also in this period–in 1940, to be precise–that Giovannino Guareschi married his Parmese sweetheart, Ennia Pallini; not long after, they produced a different sort of work–a son, Alberto. And at this time something else of importance was happening around them: war was brewing in Europe.
Though the author had already done his compulsory military service as a younger man (and even though Ennia was expecting their second child), he found himself called up again in 1943, at the height of the war. But no sooner had he reported and been posted to the field, than he and thousands of others in the Italian army became victims of an odd twist of fate. It began as good news: at home, the Nazi-aligned, Fascist rule of Benito Mussolini was overthrown, and the new Italian government signed a cease-fire with the Allies. Far from being “freed” by the deal, however, the Italian officers and soldiers were left virtually stranded in the field, now at the mercy of their former German partners. And all who would not agree to serve the Nazis were imprisoned for the duration of the war.
Because the Italians were not technically prisoners of war (their status, officially, was that of “military internee”), the rules of the Geneva Convention did not cover their captivity. They suffered terribly; Guareschi was reduced to half his weight during his internment and later claimed, in a famous phrase, that he survived only because he had vowed, “I will not die, even if they kill me.” Others were not so fortunate.
Those two years in the German Lager (prison camp) were critical ones for Guareschi, focusing and deepening his energy and commitments in a way that would remain apparent for the rest of his life. He never stopped writing in the camp, whether recording melancholy reflections in his personal diary or composing humorous pieces for the morale of his prison-mates (these collected prison writings were later published, and an English version exists). When the war ended, it was his fervent hope that men like those fellow prisoners–resilient souls who in their time together proved that, despite lacking every material comfort, it is possible for people to create for themselves a civilized and even spiritual environment–would be willing to do their part to build the new Italy.
Giovannino Guareschi himself was so willing, and it was after the war that he would produce his mature writings: the ones which had the biggest impact in his lifetime and for which he is most remembered today.
Candido and Don Camillo
On returning home from the Nazi internment camp in 1945, Giovannino Guareschi set about regaining his strength and re-establishing his literary presence in Milan. His weekly paper, Bertoldo, had been a casualty of war, but the resourceful editor was able to reassemble many of the old crowd (which included some of the leading Italian journalists/humorists of the day) and begin a new paper, Candido. Like its predecessor, Candido would publish literary pieces, cartoons, and commentary; however, this being free, post-Fascist Italy, the new paper would differ from the old in being able to take on overtly political targets.
And there were many such targets, for the Italian political situation at the end of WWII was in something of a mess. The country may have formally withdrawn from the War upon the overthrow of Mussolini, but there had been no immediate peace: instead, the conflict against the Allies was simply replaced by intense civil strife. Even as the new government was establishing itself in Rome in 1943, the Nazis were setting up a puppet regime under the deposed “Il Duce” and his supporters in the North. Rival Resistance groups–including many composed of long-oppressed Communists and Socialists–arose to oppose the remnants of Italian Fascism, but the common goal of these groups did not exactly unite them. Indeed, in the post-War years they would compete to claim credit for Fascism’s eventual demise.
Among the important national questions to be settled at the War’s end was the fate of the Monarchy, and a referendum held in 1946 resulted in the transformation of the Kingdom of Italy into the Italian Republic. Guareschi and his paper had unsuccessfully supported the King, but there was no time for Candido’s editor to retreat and lick his political wounds. In just two years, the new Republic would hold its first general elections, and the mustachio’d monarchist’s services as a propagandist were required by his second-choice party, the one he thought had the best chance of defeating the Communists and keeping Italy out of Stalin’s orbit. And, sure enough, in 1948, Alcide De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats did defeat the Communists in the national elections, with what was regarded as the indispensable assistance of Giovannino Guareschi. The writer’s weapons included cartoons, slogans, editorials, and … a book.
The book, entitled Mondo piccolo: Don Camillo, was actually a collection of pieces that had already appeared in one of Candido’s most popular weekly features–a continuing series of humorous tales about the colorful parish priest of a quaint, Northern Italian Everyvillage who is forced to deal with the fact that his town’s newly-elected, post-war government is Communist. That “Don Camillo,” the feisty priest, always proves up to the challenge posed by his formidable foe, “Mayor Peppone,” is largely thanks to the guidance of the Christ on the altar cross, with whom the embattled cleric holds frequent, frank discussions (with the reader privy to both sides of the conversation!). The Don Camillo tales were fable-like, yet they reflected a very real situation; they wickedly satirized their Red target, yet they displayed a genuine tenderness on the part of the author toward all of his characters. And, collected in book form, they made for an almost instant international bestseller.
That he became an overnight popular sensation obviously had a huge effect on Guareschi’s life, but it did not really change him: that is, he went on being Italy’s self-appointed political gadfly, using the pages of Candido both to fight Communism and to criticize “his” party (the Christian Democrats) when he felt it did not lead responsibly (and this was in an era when criticizing government figures–even if the criticism was well-founded–could be illegal). But even as their creator provoked and sometimes outright alienated establishment figures on both the Left and the Right, Don Camillo and Peppone continued to delight their fans (who ranged from peasants to Popes), both in print and on the big screen (in a series of films with Fernandel and Gino Cervi as the beloved priest and mayor).
Of course, Guareschi wrote on non-political topics, as well, and he was particularly successful with another continuing series of humorous newspaper essays (also periodically collected into books), this one depicting the joys and trials of family life in the new Italy. The family in question was his own–or, rather, a stylized version of it, with himself as bemused paterfamilias, his wife as scatterbrained but wise earth mother, and his precocious children in the role of … well, precocious children (Americans, think Dave Barry or Calvin Trillen or even “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies”). As in the case of the Don Camillo stories, there’s just the right combination of laughter and life lesson in the delightful family pieces. Indeed, they’d have made a great basis for a TV sitcom.
Roncole, Prison, and the End
In the early 1950’s, Guareschi decided to move his family to the country–to the village of Roncole Verdi, where the multi-talented author had a new family home built according to his own design. The move, though it was intended to get him out of the big city, did not signify a retreat from the public arena on Guareschi’s part: he included in the home’s plan a private apartment/office for himself so that he could do serious work on Candido there.
And in 1954 the journalist found himself very much in the public eye on account of Candido. Specifically, he ended up on the wrong side of a libel suit after he published in the paper what he believed were two shocking wartime letters between then-Resistance-leader Alcide De Gasperi (yes, the same Christian Democratic Prime Minister GG helped get elected in 1948) and the British command. In one missive, De Gasperi allegedly encouraged the Allies to bomb the city of Rome in order to demoralize German collaborators and bring a swifter end to the war. Of course, De Gasperi denied authorship, and a court agreed with him. Convinced of his source, however, Guareschi would not recant… and, as this was his second run-in with the courts in as many years (in 1952 he’d published a cartoon mocking the Italian president–a crime in those days–and earned a suspended sentence), a prison sentence was mandated.
Guareschi would later complain that his 14-month stint in jail in Parma was, in some ways, worse than his time in the German Lager. The days were filled with meaningless activity, he said, and in the beginning he was not allowed to write. When he did get pen and paper, he made good use of the time, penning among other things the screenplay for the third Don Camillo film. He was released early for good behavior.
Demoralized by his experience, GG was also experiencing health problems (some traceable all the way back to those two years in the German Lager). In 1956 he began spending several months a year in Switzerland for his constitution; then in 1957 he stepped down as editor of Candido. A retirement? Not at all: Guareschi continued as a contributor to Candido, and he also undertook a non-literary enterprise, purchasing a cafe in Roncole and running it himself.
The early ’60’s, however, did see a dramatic slow-down in Guareschi’s activity. In 1961, the company that had published Candido for 15 years bowed to external political pressure from the Left and dropped the paper. This was a severe blow to GG, and then in 1962 he suffered a heart attack. Recovery took some time. Down but not out, the embattled journalist expanded his other business, adding a restaurant onto his cafe in 1964. He also continued to write, of course, but much of his later work was tinged with melancholy. The new Italy, he feared, was not shaping up all that well. Even as the Red menace abated in the post-Stalin years, so the twin spectres of Modernism and Affluence (the latter with its attendant Complacency) arose as a challenge to the kind of society hoped for by some in those heady days right after the War.
To the regret of fans both at home and abroad, Giovannino Guareschi’s distinctive voice was silenced by a fatal heart attack in the summer of 1968. He was only 60 years old, and the prime of his career had lasted just 20 years. His popularity and influence, however, have lasted much longer.
OTHER WSORKS BY GIOVANNI GUARESCHI
Giovannino Guareschi was an extraordinarily talented man who gave himself to a variety of pursuits, both professional and amateur. I suspect many fans are aware that among the different “hats” GG wore were those of journalist, political cartoonist, polemicist, and (of course) story-teller; but did you know that, even if we restrict ourselves to just his “artistic” ones, we can still add more. How about poet, children’s author, screenwriter, comic book writer, radio dramatist, painter, lyricist, photographer, and even architect? [And that’s omitting “musician,” since I’m told that his brief stint as a mandolin teacher, mentioned in the Introduction to The Little World of Don Camillo, represented more than a bit of a stretch! 
] As Alberto Guareschi says, “Don Camillo was just the tip of the iceberg!”
The purpose of this section is to highlight a few of Guareschi’s “non-Camillo” creations. Some, like the family stories, are available in English; hopefully your appetite will be whetted sufficiently to motivate you to seek them out. Others, alas, have never been and probably never will be available to GG’s English-speaking audience; when we’re not busy lamenting the approximately 200 untranslated Don Camillo stories, we can spare some curiosity for these other pieces that will always be “foreign” to us.
Use the links below or those in the menu bar at left to learn more about…
GG’s cartoons and illustrations: from 1930s “New Yorker-esque” drawings to serious post-war political cartoons; from the simple pen-and-ink illustrations accompanying the Don Camillo chapters to several oil paintings. A versatile artist!
Comic novels (including two available in English) from the early 1940s, in something of a different vein from Don Camillo.
Humorous stories about the Guareschi family, written by GG between the 1940s and 1960s and collected into several books (including three available in English).
My Secret Diary, a memoir (of sorts) comprising the various writings GG composed for his fellow prisoners during their WWII internment under the Germans between 1943 and 1945.
“Carlotta,” a song by GG and Arturo Coppola written in 1943 while the two were prisoners.
Favola di Natale, an illustrated story (with songs) about one child’s special Christmas at the height of the War. Written by GG (with music by Coppola) in 1944, still during his captivity.
“Gente Cosi,” a 1949 film for which GG wrote the screenplay (based on a series of his own stories). Impossible to find today, it is not about Don Camillo but anticipates many of the features of the Little World.
The English-language versions of the Don Camillo books are out-of-print, but that doesn’t mean you can’t lay your hands on copies, provided you’re willing to have “previously read” ones. The best way to find them is to use an online secondhand book service, such as one of the following:
The Advanced Book Exchange: I’ve bought plenty of books, including 5 or 6 by GG, from this site. You’ll get a lot of returns when you search on the string “Guareschi,” but if you’re willing to sift through the many results, you can almost always find something in your price range.
Bibliofind: I used to love this service, till they were bought out by Amazon.com. Don’t like them near so well now, since it seems to me they play tricks like listing expensive copies first, etc. However, I list the site because the inventory’s not identical to ABE’s, so it still might be useful.
Alibris: Another with a similar database to ABE. Much more expensive than other services, though.
OR you can always try …
a big online book retailer, the two best-known of which both also claim to have secondhand book locator services. Here are the links, and my comments:
Amazon.com’s catalog lists a variety of GG’s titles– and, in that lovely Amazon way, it lists some of them multiple times, while omitting others altogether. What’s significant is that it claims that several of the titles are still in print, and that new copies are in stock or on order! What gives?
Well, the fact is that technically the books are out-of-print in English, but a specialty house called “Ameron” (a New York-based company whose address I can’t seem to find) has issued some limited-run, facsimile reprints of them. I actually bought one (from Barnes & Noble, who used to carry them but don’t anymore) in 1998. Mine’s a hardback copy of The Little World of Don Camillo which appears to have been printed in the ’70’s (and stuck in some warehouse all that time?). The quality is reasonable– it’s kind of compact in size, though, and not quite as nice as the retired library copies I’ve picked up over the years. Still, if you want un-used copies, these Ameron editions might be for you. I had email from someone who got all 6 Ameron DC titles, special-ordered from the US via a UK bookstore, circa 2000, and he’s quite pleased.
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Barnes and Noble’s website lists all of Guareschi’s books in English, identifying them as out-of-print (or, in the case of the Ameron reprints, as out of stock). BUT the New York-based B&N also offer lots of still-in-print Guareschi titles… in Italian!
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And something else– If you teach or lead a study group which is reading The Little World of Don Camillo, you might want to try to track down a company called “Teacher’s Silent Helper,” which used to (in 1998, at least) sell a Study Guide for the book (I bought mine from the organization’s now-defunct website). The product is rather home-made looking (i.e., typewriter-and-Xerox-machine-produced), but it’s essentially a “Cliff’s Notes,” with tests and quizzes included. While I can’t say I learned anything new from it, I still enjoyed leafing through it (there are some fun typos, and the whole thing is rather “vintage”). It discusses the typical areas of emphasis of a “high school English class” -level analysis: plot, characters, themes, use of language (metaphor, etc.), and historical background.
As I said, the website seems to have disappeared, but I’ll give you the company’s last known (by me) snail mail address:
Teacher’s Silent Helper
PO Box 128
Dixon, Nebraska 68732-0128
YOU’RE INVITED TO JOIN THE DON CAMILLO MAILING LIST!
The list “doncamillo” has been around since July of 1998, when Vajrang Parvate set it up at “Coollist.” Circumstances moved us to “Onelist” in January of 1999; Onelist became “eGroups” in the Spring of 2000; and eGroups was absorbed by “Yahoo!” a year later. This means that last time I checked, we were a “Yahoo!Group”– but I’ve learned not to get too used to anything…
In May of 2002 we reached 67 members, which might still be small compared to most mailing lists, and traffic has always been on the light side … but new members are welcome to come on board and try to change all that, by posting about any Guareschi- or Don Camillo- related topic. Want to discuss the stories, the films, or post-War Italy in general? Sign up and speak up; we’d love to have you!
Source : http://mywebpages.comcast.net/doncamillo/authorinfo.htm
