Merry Christmas Don Camillo: 9

Giovannino Guareschi, known as Giovanni to his millions of English-speaking readers, was born in Italy’s Valley of the Po on the 1st of May, 1908. He found his vocation after a package containing cartoons, jokes, prose and proposals was sent to the publisher Angelo Rizzoli, who was planning a new satirical magazine, to be called Bertoldo . For two years during the war, he was incarcerated in one prison-of-war camp after another in Poland and Germany, where he was reduced to a state of despair. Out of it he brought himself to the polemic that would underwrite the Don Camillo stories. Looking back, he wrote: ‘It is not enough to say: “Red is wrong, yellow is wrong, black is wrong.” You need a beautiful colour, a colour to harmonise with the world. And you have to be able to say, “We need this colour”.’ Now, in Merry Christmas Don Camillo , his Christmas stories and others written in his quest for harmony with the world (many in English for the first time) appear alongside his wartime experiences, the palette on which he mixed that ‘beautiful colour’. The book contains over 40 illustrations. —- ISBN: 9781900064590