For those who are wondering about the creator (creatrix?) of these pages, here's the condensed version of my bio.

The basic facts: name Karen Welbourn, age 41 (just missed the baby boom), currently living near Baltimore, Maryland. My life apart from the Internet :-) includes teaching philosophy, part-time, to undergraduates at a couple of local colleges. I'm a Protestant Christian of the Evangelical persuasion, though most of my (post-secondary) education was obtained at Catholic institutions. I have been reading Guareschi since the early/mid-70's: I can't remember the precise year I became "hooked" (but see "How I Met Don Camillo" for an account of how it happened); nevertheless, I'm certain that the Little World is my prime candidate for "longest- standing obsession," pre-dating even my (also-still-current) devotion to a certain literary creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I decided to create this site when, while updating my family's homepage in January, 1998, I had a hard time finding an English-language Guareschi website to which I could link as a way of indicating my quarter-century's interest in the Don Camillo stories (there were several Italian pages, but that's a language I never studied). As I searched for any on-line material related to the stories, I made several wonderful discoveries, the happiest of which was learning that the author's son and daughter are still living in Italy and are eager to exchange information with anyone interested in preserving the memory of their father and his work.

The making of these pages has "forced" me to make time in my too-busy life for a long-overdue re-reading (and then re-re-reading) of the Don Camillo corpus--a very unburdensome task, I might add--and also to read for the first time all six of Guareschi's "non-Camillo" books translated into English.  And it has occasioned my meeting, via e-mail, a number of fellow fans of the Little World, several of whom contributed information to the site. Finally, it inspired me to make an unforgettable little trip to Northern Italy in August of 1998, to see some of the places that were part of Guareschi's enchanting world.

Oh--and I'm even thinking of learning Italian!  :-)