The Don Camillo books were very popular in the US: two of them (The Little World of Don Camillo and Comrade Don Camillo) debuted here as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. They were variously marketed as whimsical humor a la James Thurber, and as "Catholic books," and as political stories... and on their coat-tails, six other books by Guareschi were translated and published in English. Their appeal cut across many demographics-- the most interesting manifestation of this, to me, being the number of people who write to say that they (as I did) first read the Don Camillo stories as adolescents. I can't speak for all of them, but I can say what it was about the Little World that took hold of this young reader's heart and imagination and never let go:

I think a big part of the tales' magic, for me, lies in the way in which they inhabit that vague, lovely place between conventional story and parable. On the one hand, Don Camillo is a real character, vivid and flawed; on the other hand, he is a sort of Everyman, and the Christ on the Cross who speaks to him speaks to all of us who wrestle daily with the challenge to love our neighbor as ourselves. Similarly, the Little World's Po Valley setting is thoroughly "rural, post-war Italy," with all its superstition and poverty and peculiar politics; yet the nameless town is also somehow timeless and set apart.

Plus, the stories are really funny. I know them like old friends, and they still make me laugh out loud.

The larger and more interesting question, of course, concerns what made the stories the phenomenon they were in their day. Why did they "take off" the way they did, not only in the US but all over the West? There can't have been a shortage of humor in those decades, yet Guareschi's particular brand really caught the public's attention.

I confess that I didn't think much about this question (at least, not in these terms) until Alberto and Carlotta Guareschi, the author's son and daughter, kindly sent me a packet of copies of old newspaper articles about their father and his work, including various reviews (contemporary with its release in English in 1950) of The Little World of Don Camillo. Reading those reviews reminded me that the stories would have had a certain urgency at the period of their composition-- that is, at the height of the Cold War-- that they simply could not have had for me when I first stumbled across them in the era of detente (let alone as I re-read them in the years after glasnost and perestroika and the collapse of the USSR). Back then, Don Camillo and Peppone were not just two endearing blowhards with opposing beliefs; instead, they represented what was for so many people in the Western world the central conflict of the day: the old order vs. the new; religion (Christianity, specifically Catholicism) vs. Communism; Church vs. State. In an ironic twist that perhaps could not have been easily foreseen then, it has turned out that neither ideology has carried the day (indeed, the century); but in those days the battle was raging. And Italy, that passionate land where the two ideologies somehow flourished side-by-side, was the perfect stage on which to see it fought.

Of course, to say that the stories addressed the key question of their day is not to say that everybody appreciated GG's treatment of the issues. One tends to cite only the positive reviews now, but there had to be (and there were) detractors. Yet for every person who was untouched by Guareschi, there were others who found him honest and fearless and wise. One thing the West couldn't seem to do was ignore what was going on in the Po Valley.

But no one I've spoken to from among those who came to know the Little World during the 50's and 60's tells me today that he or she became a fan of Don Camillo for purely political reasons; it's always ultimately personal. If you'd like to tell me about the appeal Little World has for you, please send me e-mail ... perhaps I can incorporate your perspective into these pages!