Book Review: The Little World of Don Camillo

Title: The Little World of Don Camillo

Author: Giovanni Guareschi

Translator: Una Vincenzo Trowbridge

Publisher: Farrar Straus

Date: 1950

ISBN: none

Length: 205 pages

Illustrations: cartoons by the author

Quote: “‘And anyway it was not as God’s priest that I beat you up but as my political adversary. Anyhow I did it in a moment of weakness.’ ‘Besides this and your activities in that devilish party, have you any other sins to confess?’ Peppone spilled them out, but all in all Don Camillo found nothing very serious.”

The little world of Don Camillo and his frenemy Peppone, Guareschi said in one of many reprints of his best known book, was a fictional village similar to his home town. People would quarrel and fight as if they could settle their differences in a trial by combat, but they fought “fairly, without hate,” held few grudges, and were generally goodhearted and generous. So Camillo, the priest, and Peppone, the Communist (but he hadn’t gone far enough in his studies of Marx to give up being Catholic), constantly disagreed about local politics, but never forgot that they’d been friends when younger.

In the late 1940s, Guareschi said, the incidents that suggested these stories were news items. Sometimes he’d think of a variation on a news story that would be funnier, then decide that it couldn’t happen, then read another news story in which it did happen. Would Peppone really shoot at a plane while someone in it was dropping anti-Communist leaflets? Peppone wasn’t quite mean enough to do that, but Guareschi went ahead and wrote a story about such an incident after reading that a local Communist demagogue had indeed shot down a plane from which anti-Communist leaflets were being dropped.

Are these characters stereotypical Italians? Perhaps, but few Italians seemed to mind. After all, the stereotype of Italians includes being cheerful and goodhearted, and Camillo and Peppone are portrayed as brave, honorable veterans who had each other's backs during the war.

“If there is a priest anywhere who feels offended by my treatment of Don Camillo,” Guareschi wrote, “he is welcome to break the biggest candle available over my head. And if there is a Communist who feels offended by Peppone, he is welcome to break a hammer and sickle on my back. But if there is anyone who is offended by the conversations of Christ, I can’t help it; for the one who speaks in this story is not Christ but my Christ…the voice of my conscience.” In later volumes he said that the Christ with whom Don Camillo has long imaginary conversations is to be imagined as the one in Don Camillo’s head, but of course a fictional character’s “self-talk” is his author’s too.

This was the first collection of Don Camillo stories to be printed as one volume. Though the stories were printed separately, not as a serial story, the last few can be said to give the book a climax and a denouement.