This is a difficult section to write, because (as I'm always being reminded by others when I get too picky and analytical), the warm, whimsical charm that constitutes the appeal of Guareschi's stories is a delicate and elusive thing. It's not really fair to ask it to bear the weight of lots of Serious Literary Analysis... so I won't. But I will identify a few themes that I see as running through the Don Camillo stories. Some, like the first one, will be stunningly obvious. But please challenge me via e-mail if you think I'm not reading Guareschi fairly or correctly!

[I suggest scrolling through and reading about all the themes (well, of course I do; I wrote them!), but here's a guide in case there's a particular one you want to head straight for.]

1. Communism is Bad: I think we can take this one as a given. However, it's worth asking exactly what Guareschi found objectionable about Communism. After all, in allowing Peppone and most of his cronies to be basically sympathetic characters, the author admits that you don't have to be an evil person to be attracted to the ideology. And while he doesn't exactly let Peppone win any major arguments with Don Camillo, he does allow the Mayor to present some of the better Communist rhetoric in those arguments. So, what exactly was the nature of GG's complaint?

I think it's the Soviet in "Soviet Communism" which is the big part of the problem identified by GG. This is not to say that I'm convinced Guareschi would ever have supported Marxism in some other incarnation, but simply to emphasize that it was the system as implemented in the USSR that was utterly unacceptable to him.

Alberto and Carlotta Guareschi, on their father's politics: "With the referendum of 1946, the Italians had to choose between the Monarchy and the Republic. Our father sided [unsuccessfully] with the King because he saw the danger of Marxism to come up. He took sides against Marxism when in April 1948 Italians voted.... The danger for Italy to become a satellite of the USSR was big..." [e-mail, 25 February 1998, 6 April 1998]

GG saw that Soviet-style Communism meant rule by a remote, totalitarian regime, whose administrators slavishly carried out their masters' directives without regard for the local situation. It meant an atmosphere of hatred and distrust, where ideologies were more important than people, and informing on one's "comrades" was a way of advancing in the Party ranks. It meant censorship, disinformation, and repression, of which surely Italy had had enough under Fascism. In the Don Camillo stories, these serious evils of Communism are most often illustrated in the visits of Party officials from the City-- unfeeling outsiders, with no imagination, who come from time to time to make sure that Peppone toes the line. One such visitor orders a poor Communist family not to feed its starving children some free food, just because it came in a "care package" from America.

Guareschi's fame as an anti-Communist did not rest solely on the Don Camillo stories, BTW. He was also notorious for a series of political cartoons in which he represented the Communists by a three-nostrilled man (I guess the idea was that your typical Communist was so full of hot air that he needed a third nostril to snort it out of). And GG would compose comic pieces for Candido in which he had local Communists carry out, to the letter, the most bafflingly ridiculous commands from "headquarters"-- instructions whose absurdity always turned out to be the result of typographical errors that might have been noticed (or, at least, questioned) by anyone with good judgment or common sense.

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2.  Faith is Good: Guareschi doesn't do much theological arguing in the Don Camillo stories, because Faith is a given in his Little World. None of the good--or redeemable--characters really doubts God's existence (at least, not deep down, when circumstances force them to admit their true feelings). The local Communists may oppose the Church for political reasons, but they honor Christ by removing their hats in the presence of His image, and they call for Don Camillo whenever they need something important (like a baptism or a marriage or a burial).

I will say that in one critique I read, Guareschi is accused of writing Catholic books that aren't really very Catholic-- that is, of "equating Emilian peasant cunning with Emilian religion." * I find that comment interesting, and probably valid, to an extent. For it is true that the "faith" of most of the other characters, even once it is activated, is really more of a "default," superstition-laced sort of thing, rather than the deep and pure love for God that Don Camillo exhibits in his best moments. And even Don Camillo, as he champions the Christian cause, relies as much on his own Machiavellian modus operandi as he does on the Lord.

* Emilia is the region of Italy in which Guareschi's Little World is situated

On the other hand, there is a clear, basic message in Guareschi's work, and that is this: a certain humility before the Universe is absolutely necessary in an honest man. The "good guys"-- all the decent, if fallible folks who populate the Little World-- recognize that God is in charge of the cosmos, and that man's job is to find his place in the world on those terms. And it is the recognition of that fact that enables the Little World's denizens to accept the "givens" of life, as well as its mysteries.

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3. THINK FOR YOURSELF! I suppose I could have listed this one first, since I believe Alberto Guareschi identifies it as the most important message of his father's life and work. But in the Don Camillo stories, this lesson comes to us via the more obvious themes [especially (1) ] above, so I mentioned them first. At any rate, I've already pointed out that the aspect of Communism which Guareschi seemed to spend the most time skewering was the robot-like way in which True Believers adhered to the Party Line, or what they believed to be the Party line, even when that Party line contradicted all common sense and human feeling. Thus the visiting Party official would watch Straziami's son starve, and would let the boy see his father humiliated, before deviating from the dictum to have nothing to do with America or the Church. In "The Carburetor" (Don Camillo Takes the Devil By the Tail), Peppone gets caught up in Party spirit and in the heat of debate and proclaims that he'd rather see his child die than accept medicine from America-- but the real man in him cannot sleep that night until he has told Don Camillo that he didn't mean it. For real man may (however misguidedly) oppose the Church in favor of another system that he believes in, but a real man does not toe the Party line-- any Party line-- unthinkingly and simply for its own sake.

And I think it's clear that for Guareschi, this basic principle holds true when the roles are reversed, as it were, and the "party" in question is the Church. **  Now, I'm not saying that I see overt criticism of the Church in the Don Camillo stories: even in Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children, when Don Camillo expresses disapproval of Aggiornamento, I'm not sure we're meant to see him as 100% in the right, for Christ gently chastises him about his stubbornness in this area. But in general, when the free-thinking Don Camillo butts heads with some other churchman in the stories-- a modernist curate, or the bishop's secretary-- the other is usually depicted as too strictly adhering to rules or procedures whose rationale he might be able to parrot, but which he administers legalistically.

** In considering the Church-as-"party" here, I don't mean to refer to the
Christian Democratic party. Christ is very clear to Don Camillo, and I'm
sure we can take His words as GG's, that the Church has no political party.

Of course, nowhere is this advocacy of "free and honest thought in the face of pressure to conform" more evident than in Guareschi's own personal and public life. As an Italian Army officer in 1943, he allowed himself to be taken prisoner-of-war by the Germans rather than serve the Nazis after the cease-fire between Italy and the Allies. This he did even though he had a family-- an expectant wife and a small son--to whom he might have been allowed to return had he not stood for what he believed.
      Then after the war, GG almost quixotically supported the King, only throwing in his lot with the Christian Democrats (and helping them to power over the Communists) after the monarchy's defeat in 1946. But, though Don Camillo was a faithful Christian Democrat, GG himself was to break ranks with "his" party (and, as a consequence, be accused of having Communist sympathies!) several times over the years, by openly criticizing policies he disliked. In 1954, while he was already under a suspended sentence for expressing disapproval (in a cartoon he published) of the Christian Democratic President of Italy, Guareschi published letters implicating Christian Democratic Prime Minister Alcide DiGasperi of wartime wrongdoing. DiGasperi claimed the letters were forged, sued for libel, and won: Guareschi, rather than recant when he believed his sources were genuine, went to jail for a year.
      And, finally, on the other side, GG continued to criticize Communism long after others were calling for compromise: the Afterward to 1963's Comrade Don Camillo is a melancholy manifesto from a man who fears that his may be a lone voice, crying in the wilderness.

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4. Love Conquers All: Several of the Don Camillo stories feature some pair of young lovers who must overcome a serious obstacle in order to be together. Often, the obstacle is political, as when the child of a Catholic family has fallen in love, in true "Romeo and Juliet" fashion, with the child of a Communist family (and vice-versa), to the great consternation of all involved. But ideological differences always pale in the face of true love, and the happy couple inevitably unites-- and under the Christian banner, of course!

Only two of the classic "Communist boy-loves-Catholic girl" stories made it into English: "Shotgun Wedding" (Don Camillo and His Flock) and "The War of the Carnations" (Don Camillo Takes the Devil By the Tail). [But another such tale, omitted from the translation of the first "Mondo piccolo" book, is alluded to in Don Camillo's Dilemma, when former "Romeo and Juliet" Mariolino della Bruciata and Gina dei Filotti, now married, visit Don Camillo in exile so that he can baptize their baby.] Still, there are variations on that basic theme, in other stories. "The Excommunicated Madonna" (Don Camillo's Dilemma) unites a sensitive, church-fresco-painting artist with the hard-hearted, excommunicated girl who serves as his unwitting model for a painting of the Madonna. Comrade Don Camillo's dashing Comrade Scamoggia (who one might say is "benignly Red," after the model of Peppone's men-- Italian first, then Communist) manages to get together with beautiful-but-serious Russian Comrade Nadia (an apparent True Believer under whose hammer-and-sickle exterior, it turns out, beats the heart of a woman). And, while the "romance" between Peppone's son Venom and Don Camillo niece's Flora in Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children may be more reminiscent of The Taming of the Shrew than of Romeo and Juliet, it, too, brings together a couple who began the book in opposite camps (motorcycle gangs, in fact).

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5. Home and Hearth: Now, I suppose it could be said that, while GG's unlikely romantic couples do ultimately get together, it's an interesting sort of togetherness, for the author seems to be something of a subscriber to the "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" school of thought. That is, most Little World marriages are better described as "alliances" than as "partnerships." Remember the story in which Brusco's daughter and her Communist suitor like-mindedly work side-by-side for the Party, until she enters a Red-sponsored beauty contest and arouses his jealousy? [It's "Beauty and the Beast," from Don Camillo's Dilemma.] Clearly, their platonic comrade-ship is meant to be seen as the "dysfunctional" relationship, while their battle-ridden romance is portrayed as "normal" for men and women. I think, for GG, the sexes aren't supposed to understand one another, and experiencing the other as "other" is part of romance and marriage (making the former always exciting, and the latter often exasperating!).

That said, it must be added that GG was anything but cynical about romance and the charms of the hearth. He genuinely saw marriage as an "honorable estate," and children as a blessing. The Botazzi family, I think, hovers in the background of the Don Camillo stories as an enviable image of rough-and-tumble affection. They may fight over Peppone's political involvement, and they may occasionally fail each other. But there is always respect and reconciliation and mutual concern and pride and openness and good humor, all of which things the stories both implicitly and explicitly pronounce "Good."

The point of an honest man's involvement in political wrangling, one could imagine GG saying, is to make the world safe, not "for democracy," but for the family.

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6. Italians are Italians ...a breed apart: "You may know people," Don Camillo says to the Lord at one point, "but I know Italians!" And what picture does Guareschi give us of the Northern Italians Don Camillo (and he himself) knows so well? I'd say that, overall, these Po Valley natives basically conform to the general stereotype of the Southern European / Mediterranean "peasant personality": they are a straightforwardly opinionated, stubborn, passionate people who value the simple pleasures of good food, romance, and music (preferably Giuseppe Verdi's). Their religion is plain and unfettered by deep theology, and sometimes it's hard to see where faith lets off and superstition begins. They can be fairly accused of reasoning with their fists as much as with their heads. They are deeply connected to their land (in one story, an ailing Don Camillo "tastes" the land in the local wine, and is revived) and to their dead. They are people for whom a football match can take on the significance of a real battle, so that the referee must seek refuge from the disgruntled losing fans by asking for sanctuary in the church ... and for whom the priest's granting of that sanctuary is sufficient to calm the storm! Despite what GG says, in my opinion we don't exactly get a picture of a people unique in the universe, or even in Europe. But the citizens of the Little World can still be seen as "a breed apart" from the brisk city-slickers, hearty Americans, serious Germans, and cold Russians who occasionally wander into the stories.

At their best, the inhabitants of the Little World are brave and generous and open, but like all people they are capable of lesser things. In that respect, it might be said that they are the rest of us, only with their hearts on their sleeves.

Perhaps the most interesting and distinguishing and distinctly "Italian" feature of these people is the seeming ability of many of them to hold mutually contradictory opinions without, apparently, experiencing the "disconnect." Where but in Italy, commentators have asked rhetorically, could a man be a faithful Communist six days a week, and an equally faithful Catholic on the seventh? In Guareschi's Little World, the Communists delight in baiting their parish priest, but then they seek him out when they have a baby to be baptized or a wedding to be performed or a house to be blessed or a tractor to be healed! They are constantly plotting the Revolution, but they'll take a break for Christmas Eve midnight Mass. They show off with pride their new People's Palace to "the enemy," a visiting Bishop... and then are pleased when he blesses it.

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