The Italian writer and cartoonist Giovannino Guareschi (1908-1968)--better known to his English speaking readers as "Giovanni Guareschi"--is best remembered for his series of humorous stories about the on-going conflict between the Catholic priest and Communist mayor of a small village in Italy's Po River Valley in the years just following the Second World War. Don Camillo, the big cleric with fists of steel and heart of gold, converses frequently (and colorfully) with the Lord, Who continually challenges him to take the higher path in his dealings with his Marxist adversary, Peppone. The feisty priest, alas, isn't quite able to confine his methods to the purely spiritual ... but neither is Peppone always able to toe his Party's line, so that the two find themselves seeing disconcertingly eye-to-eye at times.

The stories' universal message of the possibility of "man's humanity to man" is conveyed with a disarming simplicity which has survived translation into almost all of the world's languages (!), and in the over 50 years since their debut in Guareschi's periodical Candido, the characters of Don Camillo and Peppone have become beloved icons. The Cold War that provided their original context has ended, but on the plane of ideas, Guareschi's two combatants continue to vigorously champion their respective worldviews.

Guareschi, whose own little drawings accompany his whimsical tales, was originally presented to his American audience as "an Italian James Thurber." Perhaps today, the comparison (though I admit it wouldn't be especially apt in political terms) might be made with another humorist whose satirical pieces have appeared in the New Yorker, Midwesterner Garrison Keillor. For each man has, in short installments over a period of years, created a little world peopled with real "characters," the accounts of whose doings overflow with lessons about Life.  But if the Little World of Don Camillo is a kind of Italian "Lake Wobegon," it is one in which the stakes are raised, for its creator speaks with that special moral authority peculiar to those who have persevered though suffering.

The "out-of-print" status (in English) of as fine an author as Giovannino Guareschi is a lamentable thing, and the creation of a network among his readers is precisely the sort of project, IMO, for which the World Wide Web is ideally suited. I only hope that continued revisions will make this site more worthy of its subject, who certainly deserves to be remembered.