While Don Camillo and Peppone are Giovannino Guareschi's best-known creations, the author also devoted quite a few lines of type to humorous accounts of the doings of the inhabitants of another "little world." These tales he called his "inside" stories (the Don Camillo ones being the "outside" stories), and they feature characters and vignettes drawn (with some poetic license) from the author's own home life.

The family stories, like the Don Camillo tales, were published individually in periodicals, then later collected in book form. And we are fortunate to have in English three of these family collections: any Don Camillo fan who hasn't yet read these other books is in for a treat! Just click on the title from the list below to skip to a specific book's description, or scroll down to see them all.
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1. The House That Nino Built. NEW YORK: Farrar, Strauss, and Cudahy; 1953. Copyright © Giovanni Guareschi, 1953; translated by Frances Frenaye.
Published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz, 1953.
Published (UK) by Penguin Books, 1967.

In The House That Nino Built, the first of the autobiographical collections to appear in English, we meet the family: the "Nino" of its title is, of course, Guareschi himself, hapless "head" of a household which includes wife Margherita (whose non-standard logic keeps her husband perpetually guessing), son Albertino (quiet, observant, and not easily impressed), daughter Carlotta (headstrong and worthy of her nickname "the Duchess"), and dog Hamlet. The individual chapters, as in the Don Camillo books, are basically self-contained episodes, and each is accompanied by (what I presume is) a little Guareschi drawing like the one above (no angels and devils, though).

In its day, some American reviewers described this book as an Italian "Please Don't Eat the Daisies," and-- insofar as that suggests gentle humor about middle-class family life-- I think that's fair.

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2. My Home, Sweet Home. NEW YORK: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Inc.; 1966. Copyright © Rizzole Editore, Milano, Italy, 1954; published in Italian as Corrierino delle Famiglie. Translation by Joseph Green, copyright © 1966 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Inc.
Library of Congress catalog number 66-25133.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Ambassador Books, Ltd., Rexdale, Ontario.
[Sorry, but I don't have the British publication information at this time.]

More humorous stories about the Guareschi Family: wife Margherita, with her "tomato complex"; son Albertino, "obsessed with the sex of bicycles"; "La Passionaria" (aka "the Duchess" in the previous book), strong-willed daughter who "would rather have a bottle-capping machine than the most beautiful doll in the world"; and, of course, mustachioed author Giovannino, the long-suffering chronicler of life in this most "ordinary" of 1950's Italian households.

My Home, Sweet Home was wasn't translated until 12 years after it had appeared in Italian. And, curiously, the book contains a couple of stories in common with The House That Nino Built-- in fresh translations! Why such effort was expended (one hates to say "wasted," but ...), when there were still so many untranslated pieces by GG, is hard to say.

Interesting: This is the first volume of GG in English not to have a drawing by the author on the cover, and the first of the strictly humorous books not to contain GG's little drawings at the beginning of each chapter. I wonder why? I also notice that the photo of the author on the back of the jacket of my copy is not the same youngish- looking head shot from the earlier-published books. It shows him in his 50's--his age at the time the translation was published, not his age at the time period chronicled in the book.

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3. The Family Guareschi: Chronicles of the Past and Present. NEW YORK: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Inc.; 1970. Copyright © Rizzole Editore, Milano, Italy, 1968 (Vita in famiglia). Translation by L.K. Conrad, copyright © 1970 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Doubleday Canada Ltd., Toronto.
[Sorry, but I don't have the British publication information at this time.]

This is the last collection of pieces by Guareschi featuring his family; it was published here posthumously. It has a more pronounced bittersweet tone than the others, for this book is to GG's family stories what Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children is to his Little World stories: one last visit with the familiar characters now that they have "grown up" (or simply grown old).  Here's a passage from the beginning of the chapter "Passionaria Deserts Us" (in which the author recounts his daughter's wedding):

"A poor writer goes out of his mind trying to create a few characters to use in his stories and what happens the minute he has the characters where he wants them? One by one they abandon him. I've managed to come up with six: Don Camillo and Peppone for the 'ouside' stories, for export; Albertino, Passionaria, Margherita, and Hamlet the dog for the 'inside' stories, about the family. Hamlet was the first to leave me--in the usual trite way, ending his days under the wheels of a car. The second to go was Albertino, in an even triter way, by becoming a paterfamilias. Now even Passionaria's left my little world, moving from the literary to the lactary realm. You'll no doubt tell me it was my own fault for not stopping their growth at a certain point in time and keeping them tidily at the ages of eight and ten. And in the same fashion Margherita would have remained young always. Actually it wouldn't have been difficult to do, because an author's characters are only puppets and his to do with as he pleases--but it's hard, if not impossible, to keep the puppeteer from growing old."

The Family Guareschi is divided into two sections. Part one, called "From Teacher to Pupil," contains reminiscences of Guareschi's parents and of his own younger days. Part two, called "Stories about Jo," features a modern young woman who works for the Guareschis: serving as a foil for old-fashioned Giovannino, she represents the Italian present and future.

Interesting: The book jacket contains a cover photo, in sepia tones, of an Italian man behind the wheel of an old Fiat tractor; perched beside him is an old woman who could be his mother, and there's another hatted figure hidden behind her. Does anyone know whether this is a photo of a previous generation of Guareschis?

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