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Giovanni Guareschi (1908-1968) |
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Italian journalist, humorist, short story writer and novelist, famous for his stories of the small village Roman Catholic priest Don Camillo, and his adversary, the Communist mayor Peppone. Both are equally stubborn and hot-tempered. Most of the conflicts of these allegorical Cold War figures of Italian politics end in a compromise. Giovanni Guareschi's stories were first published in the magazine Candido, and later collected in anthologies. Although Guareschi did not enjoy critical acclaim in his own country, he became one of the most translated Italian authors of the twentieth century. "Don Camillo had come into the world with a constitutional preference for calling a spade a spade. His parishioners remembered the time he found out about a local scandal involving young girls of the village with some landowners well along in years. On the Sunday following his discovery, Don Camillo had begun a simple, rather mild sermon, when he spotted one of the offenders in the front pew. Taking just enough time out to throw a cloth over the crucifix at the main altar so that Christ might not hear what was going to follow, he turned on the congregation with clenched fists and finished the sermon in a voice so loud and with words so strong that the roof of the little church trembled." (from The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi, translated from the Italian by Una Vincenzo Troubridge, New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1950, pp. 15-16) Giovanni Guareschi was born in Fontanelle di Roccabianca, near
Parma. His father, Primo Augusto, owned a small shop. "At the time when
I was born my father was interested in all kinds of machines, from
harvesters to gramaphones, and he possessed an enormous moustache, very
similar to the one I wear under my nose." ('How I Got Like This,' in The Little World of Don Camillo, translated by Una Vincenzo Troubridge, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, thirtieth impression 1970, p. 10) Lina
Maghenzani, Guareschi's mother, was the village's elementary school teacher.
Guareschi's childhood was happy, but the family lost all their money in
the financial crisis of 1926-27 and Guareschi was unable to continue
his studies at the University of Parma. His parents wanted him to become a naval engineer, but Guareschi ended up studying law. Before entering into journalism
he worked as a doorman at a sugar refinery in Parma, boarding school
teacher and a proofreader. Moreover, according to his own words, he gave mandolia lessons although he knew nothing about music. (Ibid., p. 11) Guareschi wrote first for a local newspaper.
In 1929 he became editor of the magazine Corriere Emiliano, and from 1936 to 1943 he was the chief editor of the humour magazine Bertoldo, in Milan. In 1940 Guareschi married Ennia Pallini, his Parmese sweetheart, whom he had known several years; she became the center of his autobiographical columns. Guareschi's first book, La Scoperta di Milano (1941), dealt with his family life. During World War II Guareschi joined Italian Army – partly to avoid a trial after he had in the midlle of the night loudly mocked Mussolini's government: "Well, in those two hours (from one o'clock to three) I shouted things that the next day I found diligently transcribed in a report and shown to me by an important person of the UPI in his office in Via Pagano." (quoted in Don Camillo Stories of Giovannino Guareschi: A Humorist Portrays the Sacred by Alan R. Perry, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, p. 12) In 1943 the Royal Air force destroyed Guareschi's home in a bombing raid. When the Allies signed an armistice with Italy, Guareschi was arrested by the Germans, and sent to a concentration camp in Poland. These experiences Guaraschi described in his war memoirs Diario Clandestino 1943-45. He also wrote a play, La Favola di Natale (1945) for his fellow inmates. The play was based on a dream which flies with his son Alberto above the barbed wire back to Italy. While in a prison in Milan, Guareschi met the partisan and
Roman Catholic Priest, Don Camillo Valota, who was en route to the
Dachau concentration camp. He was a widely admired figure among
Resistance fighters. His ideals, to act according to one's conscience,
rather than political or ideological beliefs to get rid of Fascism,
made a deep impact on Guareschi. A few months after his Guareschi's return in 1945, he was hired together with Carlo Mosca and Gianci Mondaini, to found the satirical and Monarchist weekly Candido. Mosca and Guareschi were co-editors until 1950. Guareschi' s writings mostly attacked the Communist and were then used by the anti-Communist block for their purposes. His political satires and posters contributed to the defeat of the Communists in 1948. However, Guareschi also mocked the government and Christian Democrats. In 1954 he published two facsimile letters allegedly written by Alcide de Gasperi, leader of the Christian Democratic Party and the Prime Minister. These wartime letters contained a suggestion by De Gasperi, then a leader in the Resistance, that the British military authorities bomb Rome in order to demoralize supporters of Germany and end the war sooner. De Gasperi denied authorship and successfully sued, and Guareschi was sentenced to a year in jail for libel. "I'm going to prison. I take the guilty verdict the same way I would a punch in the face," he wrote. "I don't care about showing that it's been given to me unjustly." (quoted in Don Camillo Stories of Giovannino Guareschi: A Humorist Portrays the Sacred, p. 20) Guareschi refused to appeal, and spent 409 days in Parma's San Francesco prison, and then six months on probation. The court never proved that the letters were false. While in prison, Guareschi wrote the screenplay for the third Mondo piccolo film, Don Camillo e l'onorevole Peppone (1955, Don Camillo's Last Round). Guareschi suffered his first heart attack in 1962. Since his imprisonment Guareschi's health had slowly deteriorated; he also smoked and had a weight problem. In the village of Roncole Verdi, where he had moved with his family in the 1950s, he began to run a cafe next to Giuseppe Verdi's home and then expanded it into a restaurant. Guareschi worked incessantly. Just in case of emergency, he had two Olivetti typewriters. While on vacation in Cervia, Guareschi died in a hotel room, after another heart attack, on July 22, 1968. His private office and personal archive was left untouched for decades. Don Camillo stories made Guareschi in the 1950s one of the most popular writers
of Italy, but he was not a favorite of the critics. By declaring himself an anti-intellectual Guareschi mocked the literati.
Until the 1990s, his work was largely ignored by academic
research. The 'Mondo Piccolo' stories (The Little World of Don Camillo) were set in a small village by the River Po – "The Po begins at
Piacenza, and so does the world of my stories, a little world situated
on that slice of the Plain that stands between the river and the
Apennines". ('Introduction' by Giovanni Guarechi, 1948, in The Little World of Don Camillo, translated by Adam Elgar, edited by Piers Dudgeon, Sawdon, North Yorkshire: Pilot Productions, 2013, p. x) The first tale appeared in 1946 in Candido,
and was received with enthusiasm. The two main characters are the cantankerous parish priest, Don Camillo Tarocci (his surname is rarely mentioned), and the straight-talking Communist mayor, Giuseppe Bottazzi, better know as Peppone; he bears some resemblance to the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti. Camillo and Peppone have opposite views in all possible social, political, moral, and other issues. At the same time, there is a strong bond between them. The third and very important character is Christon the crucifix above the high altar. His patient voice guides Don Camillo gently. In a typical story (from The Little World of Don Camillo, 1948) an old house has caught fire. Camillo and Peppone with a crowd of people have arrived on the scene. Peppone smells kerosene odors, and Camillo wants to see the fire closer. Peppone follows, they both don't want to retreat. Suddenly they hear a voice saying "Stop!" and turn around, running to safe. The house explodes. Afterwards, on their way back home, Camillo tells that he had set the house on fire because there was a weapons cache in the cellar. Peppone, a former resistance fighter, tells that he is relieved because the weapons cache had worried him like the sword of Damocles. Camillo tells Peppone that he took one machine gun with him, to be ready when the revolution breaks out. In Il compagno Don Camillo
(1963) these Tom and Jerry-like characters make a trip to the Soviet
Union, a few years before the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. When
Don Camillo sees women in men's overalls sweeping the streets, driving
the drolley cars, and labouring on a building under constructionhe
whispers in Peppone's ear: "These women not only have men's rights,
they have women's rights as well! (Comrade Don Camillo, translated by Frances Frenaye, New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1964, p. 79) Guareschi
wrote in a note from the author: ". . . the story which came out in
installments in 1959, although it lives on because of the vitality of
its charactes, is out-of date. Its essentially light-hearted quarrel
with Communism is understandable only in the light of the time at which
it was written." (Ibid., p. 210) With undestanding satire, the antagonism between Communist block and Western World, the Christian Democrats and the Communists, was reduced in the village the to grassroot level. Guareschi's made both sides look funny but in their own way reasonable. Although the author was a devout Catholic and his sympathies were more on Camillo's side, the Church never officially recognized his work. Often his solution to confrontations was a compromise, neighbourly love and reconciliation. "Don Camillo, let us remain within the law," Jesus says in 'Rivalry'. "If, in order to drive the truth into the head of one who is in error, your remedy is to shoot him down, where was the use of My allowing Myself to be crucified?" (The Little World of Don Camillo, 1970, p. 65) Moreover, Guareschi's ability to describe the social-political problems believable also led his readers to think, that the village really exists and they started to send there relief packets. Many Guareschi's Don Camillo stories have been adapted into movies and television shows. The title role was played by the French-born character actor Fernandel in five productions. Though they were very popular, Guareschi felt that the films were not faithful to the spirit and message of his tales. In the TV series Pequeno Mundo de Don Camillo (1957), produced in Brazil by TV Tupi, Otelo Zeloni and Heitor de Andrade played Don Camillo and Peppone. Mario Adorf and Brian Blessed were in the central roles in BBC's 13 part television series from 1981, entitled The Little World of Don Camillo. In 1962, accepting the offer of the owner of Opus Films, Gastone Ferranti, Guareschi decided to collaborate with the Marxist writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini on a full-length film falled La rabbia (1963, Rage), which they both edited separately from unused newsreel footage from the archives of cinegiornale Mondo Libero. In his part, Guareschi argued over pictures of violence at a rock 'n' roll concert in France: "The frantic search for material goods, the lack of faith in the future, the disintegration of the family, these are the roots of our discontent and anguish." ('Comparative Anti-Americanism in Western Europe' by David Ellwood, in Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan, edited by Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger, 2000, p. 34) After seeing Guareschi's episode, Pasolini withdrew from the whole project. "There's an anti-Communism that isn't neo-fascist but comes diretly from the 1930s. It's got everything: racism, the yellow peril, and the typical Fascist presentation of 'evidence' – an accumulation of facts that cannot be demonstrated," Pasolini argued. "I don't want to be an accomplice to such a horrible thing." (quoted in Don Camillo Stories of Giovannino Guareschi: A Humorist Portrays the Sacred, p. 153) Pasolini's first part, a one-hundred-minute-long film, was chopped by Ferranti in half. La rabbia received bad reviews and failed at the box office. The film was shelved in 1963 possibly because Warner Bros. did not accept Guareschi's anti-Americanism. (Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics by Marc James Léger, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015, p. 181) Raro Video released the two-part compilation in 2011. Guareschi and Finland: During the era of President Urho Kekkonen, from the late 1950s to the 1980s, Guareschi's books were very popular in Finland and read as comments on contemporary politics. Similarities between the political situation in Finland and Italy are several: a strong Communist movement, clear dichotomy between left and right, influential church institution – Protestant in Finland, but no less visible. When the Reds lost the Finnish Civil War (1917-18), the Communist Party was more or less illegal in the 1920s and 1930s. After World War II the Communist movement gained strong support in parliament elections and in local politics. Although religious debate wasn't such a big issue in the Lutheran Finland, the men of principle were as stubborn in the backwoods of Finland as in the famous small village somewhere by the river Po. Guareschi's popularity started to decline with the fall of the Communist movement, but in the late 1988 his short stories were reprinted by the publishing house WSOY in the Bestsellers series. Camillo films starring Fernandel (Fernand Contandin, 1902-1971): Le Petit monde de Don Camillo / The Little World of Don Camillo (1952), dir. Julien Duvivier; Le retour de Don Camillo / The Return of Don Camillo (1953), dir. Julien Duvivier; La Grande bagarre de Don Camillo / Don Camillo's Last Round / Don Camillo e l'on (1955), dir. Carmine Gallone; Don Camillo Monseigneur / Don Camillo monsignore ma non troppo (1961), dir. Carmine Gallone; Il compagno Don Camillo / Don Camillo in Moskow (1965), dir. Luigi Comencini. The sixth Don Camillo film in the Fernandel-Cervi series was never completed. Gino Cervi (1901-1974): Italian actor, who was best known in the postwar years for his role as Peppone. Cervi's prolific career spanned five decades. Other Don Camillo films: Don Camillo e giovani d'oggi (1972), dir. Mario Camerini, starring Lioner Stander (Peppone) and Gastone Moschin (Don Camillo); Don Camillo (1983), dir. Terence Hill, screenplay Lori Hill, starring Terence Hill (Don Camillo) and Colin Blakely (Peppone). For further reading: A dottrina con Don Camillo: i fondamenti dell'agire umano by Samuele Pinna, introduzione di Davide Riserbato, glossario a cura di Federica Favero (2022); Ritrovare Guareschi: "Mondo piccolo-Don Camillo": atti del convegno di studi, Milano, 10 ottobre 2018, a cura di Ermanno Paccagnini e Daniela Tonolini (2022); Pensare con la matita: l'impatto dell'esperienza del Lager sullo stile grafico di Giovannino Guareschi by Gloria Mariotti (2020); Framing Literary Humour: Cells, Masks and Bodies as 20th-century Sites of Imprisonment by Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard (2020); Don Camillo Stories of Giovannino Guareschi: A Humorist Portrays the Sacred by Alan R. Perry (2008); 'Guareschi, Giovanni,' in World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 2, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); My Secret Diary by Giovanni Guareschi (1958); My Home, Sweet Home by Giovanni Guareschi (1966); The Family Guareschi by Giovanni Guareschi (1970) Selected works:
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