Of Marcello Veneziani

Like today (yesterday for those reading, n.d.r.), fifty years ago, in the fateful '68, he went to the other world Giovannino Guareschi. He left the small world that few had described, to reach the big world, the one where that Lord lived who in his House gave advice to one of his fiery dependents on earth, Don Camillo. At least that's what Guareschi says.

He left early, Giovannino, a 60 years, after a troubled life, between concentration camp, prison under fascism and anti-fascism, plus a host of books translated all over the world, of very popular films that represented that fabulous post-war Italy, and adventures in the press, like his impertinent Candide who played a decisive role in the defeat of the social-communist popular front in the 1948 elections.
Giovannino died on 22 July '68 but he had time to write his last Don Camillo dedicated to today's young people. The book was released posthumously and marked the striking contrast between the old communist Peppone (that the anti-communist Guareschi had made sympathetic with his irrepressible humanity), the tough Don Camillo and a young, beardless protester, who was traveling on a motorbike with studded and fringed bags and a black jacket with a skull and the words "Veleno". Which becomes the boy's nickname for Guareschi and also the metaphor of the protest. "The Chinese" also arrive in the town of Brescello and upset the ideological geometries of the Italian-Stalinist Peppone and also displace the religious ones of the parish priest. Guareschi links the protest to the advent of the consumer societyi. For him the antagonism between the two phenomena is only occasional, related, not substantial. Consumerism devours the small ancient world and the old faiths, but he catches Peppone who leaves his bike and rides in a red spider. Consumerism is the habitat of 1968.
Guareschi's criticism expresses the conservatives' way of seeing – and recalls the parallel of another Guareschian humorist, Giovanni Mosca, who published his cartoons in Il Tempo. Guareschi considered the sixty-eighters "a ruthless and unpredictable generation" for "their cynicism and their often sacrilegious nonchalance". With a substantial reversal of prejudices: “while once the bad guy tried to appear good, today the good tries hard to give the idea that he is not good". Sheep disguised as wolves. Before the do-goodism there was the nastiness of the 1968 people. And he hadn't seen the years of lead...
Guareschi exorcises '68 with his conservative beliefs: “The way changes but men remain as God created them because God has not made any reform and his laws are perfect, eternal and immutable". But his was more an act of faith than an intimate conviction. A faith in life that continues while it was irreversibly changing and in his case he was definitively turning his back on it. The small world disappeared in the global era.
In the portrait I dedicated to him in my book Unforgivable I defined it“the primary school teacher of republican Italy”. Because he taught several generations the abecedary of national life and political passions, the elementary bases of phrasebook and feelings, spiced with the good-natured irony of an Emilian Po Valley. If we want to rediscover the atmosphere of post-war Italy, Christian Democrat and Communist, we must resort to his prose which managed to ennoble that little clerical-communist Italy without being Christian Democrat and much less communist. The common thread that bound Don Camillo, Peppone and Giovannino himself was national and provincial populism, the passion for Italy, the sanguine and passionate temperament, generosity versus greedy selfishness, the strong sense of family and civil and religious ties.
Three paradoxes accompanied Guareschi's life. After two years of brutal life in Nazi concentration camps, After the war he passed for a fascist. After having won the battle of images and words in 1948 by supporting the Degasperian DC, he was sent to prison by De Gasperi himself, for several months. After having founded the most effective weekly in the fight against communism, White, he humanized the communists in the figure of Peppone and even made them likable. And he wrote about Candide, for domestic use and in installments, the first black book of communism. Let's not forget that Guareschi was born, he lived and died in the Po Red Triangle of partisan massacres. Guareschi was a kind of homeopathic cure against Stalin. Mustaches against mustaches. The mustachioed silhouette of Stalin stood out in Guareschi's anti-communist propaganda. Other 'autobiographical' mustaches stood out on the face of the little man lying under the headboard of the White. When he won his political battle Guareschi felt humane and chivalrous understanding for the vanquished: “I am sentimental and I felt so sorry thinking about the castaways huddling around the mast erected in the center of the raft. Then I thought what if the Front had won, I probably would have dangled from the top of that tree by my neck and then I felt less sorry.".
Guareschi noted that the constitutional charter it protected the landscape but not the dignity of Italy; when we moved from paper to facts, the inequality ceased, in the sense that not even the landscape was protected...A beautiful book on GG and today's world was published by Alessandro Gnocchi from Guareschi (Letters to posterity by Giovannino Guareschi, ed. Marsilio).
Giovannino was a sanguine Catholic, a little pagan but authentic, who loved wine not only because it was the blood of Christ. He would have shared the theology of tortellini, of which an illustrious countryman of his spoke, Cardinal Biffi; that is, the idea of ​​an incarnate Catholicism that has the taste for life for eternity.
He was a profoundly Italian conservative in character and humor, in the landscape that peeked out in its pages, in the scents of cooking and everyday life that emanated from his prose, in the values ​​and common sense that emerged in his stories. Guareschi embodied the majority of Italians, homemade ones, like grandma's tagliatelle. From the north as well as the south, padani, Romans and Southerners.
Guareschi was a writer of reality without being subscribed to neorealism; but the neorealists, almost all with PCI cards, they sophisticated reality with the envelope of Marx Freudian ideology and confused realism with brutality and squalor. Guareschi no; sanguine but also a poet, he represented men in their integrity; and men are made of flesh and dreams, of tears and joy, of fists and tenderness, of culatello and prayers.
He loved tradition, the old trinity God, homeland and family, the connection with the roots and with the earth, the living sense of community. He was always a monarchist and in the midst of 1968 a flag with the Savoy coat of arms accompanied him to the cemetery. With Guareschi we lost the genuine candor of a divine simplicity, the village love of life in a time that today seems prehistoric to us.
MV, The weather 22 July
Source: http://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/guareschi-del-68-se-ne-fece-un-baffo/