| Giovannino Guareschi OCI | |
| Birth Name: | Giovannino Oliviero Giuseppe Guareschi |
| Birth Date: | 1 May 1908 |
| Birth Place: | Roccabianca, Emilia, Italy |
| Death Place: | Cervia, Romagna, Italy |
| Resting Place: | Church of St Michael Archangel, Le Roncole, Busseto |
| Children: | Carlotta Alberto |
Giovannino Oliviero Giuseppe Guareschi (pronounced as /it/; 1 May 1908 – 22 July 1968) was an Italian journalist, cartoonist, and humorist whose best known creation is the priest Don Camillo.
Guareschi was born into a middle-class family in Fontanelle di Roccabianca, in the province of Parma, in 1908.[1] He always joked about the fact that he, a big man, was baptized Giovannino, a name meaning "little John" or "Johnny". In 1926, his family went bankrupt and he could not continue his studies at the University of Parma. After working at various minor jobs, he started to write for a local newspaper, the Gazzetta di Parma.[2] In 1929, he became editor of the satirical magazine Corriere Emiliano, and from 1936 to 1943 was the chief editor of a similar magazine called Bertoldo.
In 1943, Guareschi was drafted into the army, which apparently helped him to avoid trouble with the Italian Fascist authorities. He ended up as an artillery officer. When Italy signed the armistice of Cassibile with the Allies in 1943, he was arrested as an Italian military internee and imprisoned with other Italian soldiers in camps in German-occupied Poland for almost two years, including at Stalag X-B near Sandbostel. He later wrote about this period in Diario Clandestino (My Secret Diary).
After the war, Guareschi returned to Italy and in 1945 founded a monarchist weekly satirical magazine, Candido.[1] After Italy became a republic, he supported the Christian Democracy party. He criticized and satirized the Italian Communist Party in his magazine, famously drawing a Communist as a man with an extra nostril, and coining a slogan that became very popular: "Inside the voting booth God can see you, Stalin can't." When the Communists were defeated in the 1948 Italian general election, Guareschi did not put his pen down but also criticized the Christian Democracy party.
In 1950, Candido published a satirical cartoon by Carlo Manzoni poking fun at Luigi Einaudi, the then president of the Republic. The President is at the Quirinal Palace, surrounded by, instead of the presidential guard of honour (the corazzieri), giant bottles of Nebbiolo wine, which Einaudi actually produced on his land in Dogliani. Each bottle was labeled with the institutional logo. The cartoon was judged "in contempt of the President" by a court at the time. Guareschi, as the director of the magazine, was held responsible and sentenced.
In 1954, Guareschi was charged with libel after he published two facsimile wartime letters from resistance leader and former Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi requesting that the Allies of World War II bomb the outskirts of Rome in order to demoralize Nazi German collaborators. The legitimacy of the letters was never established by the court; after a two-month trial, it found in favour of De Gasperi. Guareschi declined to appeal the verdict and spent 409 days in Parma's San Francesco jail, and another six months on probation at his home.[3]
His most famous comic creations are his short stories, begun in the late 1940s, about the rivalry between Don Camillo, a stalwart Italian priest, and the equally hot-headed Peppone, Communist mayor of a Po River Valley village in the "Little World". These stories were dramatized on radio, television and in films, most notably in the series of films featuring Fernandel as Don Camillo.
By 1956, Guareschi's health had deteriorated and he began spending time in Switzerland for treatment. In 1957, he retired as editor of Candido but remained a contributor. He died in Cervia in 1968 of a heart attack at the age of 60.
The Guareschi family only discovered after 1980 that the original English language publishers made unauthorised cuts in the Don Camillo stories, and only published 132 of the original 347 Italian stories. After an approach from Piers Dudgeon of Pilot Productions, the family authorised him to publish uncut translations into English of all the original 347 stories.[4] The copyright is vested in the family, and the books published so far are as follows: