From the Shelves of the Paco Library

I believe it was friend, commenter and fellow blogger, Richard McEnroe, who made a reference in the comments section a couple of weeks ago to the Don Camillo stories of Italian journalist and cartoonist Giovanni Guareschi. This sent me rummaging through my library looking for the two books in the series that I possess, and renewing my acquaintance with these little comic gems, which I purchased at a library sale and read straight through, nearly ten years ago.

Guareschi provides a charming introduction to “The Little World” of Don Camiilo in Don Camillo and His Flock:

When I was a young man I worked as a reporter and went around all day on a bicycle looking for news stories for the paper. One day I met a girl and after that I spent so many hours thinking about how this girl would feel if I became Emperor of Mexico, or maybe died instead, that I had very little time left for anything else. So at night I filled my allotted space with invented stories which people liked very much because they were much more true to life than true ones. Of course, there is nothing surprising about this, because stories, like people, grow in a certain atmosphere. That’s why geography is important.

The stories in this book take place somewhere in the valley of the Po river…People born near the Po river have heads as hard as pig iron, a highly developed sense of humor, and where politics is concerned they can get as excited as a man who has swallowed a mouse.

They are very attached to their slice of land and in spite of floods and fog, the fierce summer heat, and damp winter cold, they admit that, after all, God knew his business when He made the Little World.

The hero of the novels is Don Camillo, the priest of a small village in Northern Italy. A former partisan in WWII, he is a man powerful in both physical build and spirit, and the books center on his long-running feud with the communist mayor, Giuseppe Botazzi (“Peppone”) who was likewise a partisan, but, obviously, with a different faction.

One of the recurring features of the stories is the series of conversations that Don Camillo has with Christ (who speaks to the priest from the crucifix in the village church). They are generally humorous chats, in which Our Lord gently reproaches Don Camillo for his frequently hot-headed and occasionally misguided espousal of the faith. In one story (from Don Camillo and His Flock), lightning strikes the church spire and severely damages it. Peppone sees this as a judgment on the Church, itself, and says so publicly; furthermore, he refuses to allocate funds to repair the spire. Don Camillo is mystified as to why lightning should strike the church, as opposed to Peppone’s “People’s Palace”, and is not entirely satisfied by Christ’s attempt to calm him. Taking matters into his own hands, Don Camillo balances the books during the next storm by creating some “lightning” of his own, tossing a grenade onto the roof of the People’s Palace, which creates a vast explosion as it touches off a cache of dynamite that the local communists had hidden in the attic. As the mayor and the townsfolk gather around the ruin of the People’s Palace, Don Camillo walks over to Peppone.

”It was quite a stroke of lightning,” he observed, “much more powerful than mine. It made a magnificent noise and did quite a bit of damage. Someone really ought to study it from a scientific point of view. I think I’ll speak to the police sergeant about it.”

“Keep your nose in your own dirty business,” said Peppone.

“My business is to get you to repair the church tower.”

Peppone shot him a somber look.

“All right,” he said between clenched teeth. “But some day I’ll settle accounts with you.”

Don Camillo then goes to his church, knowing full well that Christ would want a word with him.

”Don Camillo,” said Christ severely, when the priest stood before him in the church. “Aren’t you going to thank Me because the People’s Palace was struck by lightning?”

“No,” said Don Camillo, with his head hanging. “A stroke of lightning is part of the natural order created by God. Surely God wouldn’t inconvenience wind, clouds, lightning and thunder simply in order to please a poor devil of a country priest…”

“Exactly,” said Christ., “and how could God take advantage of a storm to throw a bomb on the roof of the People’s Palace? Only a poor devil of a country priest could think up a thing like that…Aren’t you repentant already?”

No, Lord,” whispered Don Camillo. “It’s still too early. I must ask for an extension.”

Christ sighed, and Don Camillo went off to bed.

In Comrade Don Camillo, the communist mayor wins ten million lira in a soccer sweepstakes, but has done so under an assumed name (if he had taken possession of the money in his own name, he would have had to pay taxes and pay the balance over to the Party – or even worse, to his wife). Don Camillo helps him out by quietly depositing the money for him; however, when Peppone is later invited to make a visit to the Soviet Union, Don Camillo uses his knowledge of Peppone’s winnings as leverage to secure a spot for himself in the mayor’s entourage. Traveling in disguise as one of the “comrades”, Don Camillo visits the Workers’ Paradise (his prayer book bound between the covers of a volume labeled Maxims of Lenin), where the priest and his adversary get a first-hand look at the “achievements” of genuine communism.

The books are a humorous look at the ongoing, permanent battle between the sacred and the secular, the timeless and the timely, Christ’s ambassadors and Lenin’s, at a period in Italy’s history when both Christians and communists enjoyed enthusiastic mass support. Several of the individual books are still in publication, and there are one or more omnibus collections available, as well.