Despite this regard it has not been recognized by the official culture, Guareschi certainly the writer who knew better than others in difficult times in which he lived and wrote, to take the soul of this strange country, Italy, transforming the ordinary men of his novels and his paradigmatic figures in stories. It took years and a lot of stubbornness on the part of enthusiastic scholars like Alexander because he could do on his dissertation and academic studies. But if the critics and the "barony" right-thinking progressive and still turn up their nose in front of his name, Guareschi, a hundred years after his birth and forty of his death, and this is more alive than ever in the hearts of millions of readers and spectators.
rediscover Guareschi means rediscovering the man and all his work, without necessarily stopping the simplicity of the film version. From the many stories of the cycle Little World (Peppone and those of Don Camillo) to the novels before the war and its aftermath, which gives us the possibility that Italy will take real, deep, of the twentieth century, which is not is in the literary products in the abstract speculations arised from urban living, from gatherings related to intellectual "circles that count", which are also show in the textbooks, but Guareschi is masterfully described in the stories.
authentic history and yet full of magic fairy tales, poetry as an expression of civil commitment, full of surreal humor never, never tinged with sarcasm bad. Stories that - as Paul writes in his book Gulisano "That Christian Guareschi" - "are expressions of that good rice that comes from compassion for this man who combines in its narrowness and its clumsiness, frantically in daily life, perhaps eventually to the sea to the other or himself. "
The injury that has weighed on Guareschi for forty years was motivated by his being an author was "deployed" and "deployed" evil in the eyes of the dominant culture. A reactionary, a follower of the trio "God, Country and Family." A concept, however, the latter, which is fine, referred to Guareschi, if only as an expression of human virtues, civil and religious, and not the other way when interpreted in its idolatrous, who found that time and that is still fertile ground in fundamentalism, nationalism, racism in the exclusive, so far from the way of thinking and living the life just John.
God, country, family. The religious dimension, civic engagement, the essential value of the domestic affections.
The religious dimension. Reading, for example, the stories of World small , one realizes that there is, beyond the stories and characters, another character, a subject of God, the merciful, master of the events and the heart, which had met Guareschi dramatic experience of suffering already in the German concentration camp where he was interned as an Italian military. That Divine Providence which continues, despite everything, to govern the individual and social history from a perspective of salvation and redemption, and that is to say Guareschi on Candido of December 7, 1947: "We do not belong to no ism. We have an idea, yes, but does not end in ism. The thing is very simple: we believe there are two ideas to the world at war: the idea of \u200b\u200bChristian anti-Christian idea. We are for the idea we are Christian and therefore with all those who pursue it, and only until the pursuing. When, in our humble opinion, someone deviates from this principle, anyone (even if our parish priest) we automatically become his opponents ... In the end, perhaps, we meet with six players in everything. " Because if a Christian is no stranger to the dominant mentality, it means being a servant of the power of the moment, one of the many tyrants who oppress the man, be it the Emperor or the State or the party or class or Race or Science or Progress or money.
The civil commitment. It was the commitment that led him, among other things, after the common battle that preceded the anti-first free elections after the war, the fight with De Gasperi, a consequence of disaffected of John to the statesman, which began shortly after the great success of the April 18, 1948. Italy the Christian Democrats was shaping was not what the writer expected. The economic recovery, necessary and indispensable, as a side effect was causing the emergence of those phenomena that have taken firm roots in the First Republic, and arrived amplified until today: business, corruption, cronyism, favoritism. Unavoidable impacts of the development process? Guareschi of these excuses do not want to know. His morality is not contemplated in its crystalline vocabulary the word "compromise": evil is evil, period. It is not lawful to steal, cheat, steal indebitamente, sfruttare. “Un uomo di difficili costumi” , disse di se stesso. E per questo pagò – come immagino ci spiegherà meglio Alessandro fra un attimo – con il carcere, nel quale scontò, primo giornalista nella storia repubblicana, ben 409 giorni di ingiusta detenzione.
E per finire, il valore irrinunciabile degli affetti domestici. C’è un ulteriore Guareschi, da riscoprire. E’ lo scrittore che più di ogni altro ha rivolto la propria attenzione alla famiglia. Una famiglia che, per Giovannino, è fatta di ruoli, di responsabilità, di amore, of rules that are broken, reaffirmation of date, re-written. It 'made up of quarrels, squabbles, reconciliation, long faces, tenderness, solidarity and above all loyalty. The love between parents, between them and the children, between siblings, is loud, passionate, fickle, changeable, but faithful. The meaning and value of family Guareschi had learned on the course, from their parents. A model of education that led him to clash with even clerical circles, carrying forward the image of Christianity sweetened electric guitars that spread widely in the years immediately following the Council, with those who developed the concept of multiple models Family construed as mere aggregates of people who are self-determined manner exquisitely contracts; that led him to write important pages in the case against euthanasia and eugenics which were then already appeared, and against which Guareschi wrote pages of intense topical truly staggering.
This, in brief, the Guareschi that I, like many others, I learned to love. In the last months of his life, facing the distressing spectacle offered by the Italian company at the time, he wrote, with a diagnosis of acute sa prophecy: "Every day more and more I realize how futile and useless What manly way to fight against rogue organizations. Unfortunately, these are the days of the failed ideas of others unless it is the era of demagogues, the politicians, the hypocrites who, in the name of social justice, are perpetrating the most horrendous injustice depersonalize the individual, then kill him to create " average idiot "mentality in which radio, television and the other government propaganda must be matching programs every day."
A sad though, that was never separated from the hope that accompanied him until the last day and that mi sento di poter sintetizzare con quella bella frase che compare nel finale di un film del ’63, La rabbia , che Guareschi contribuì a realizzare: “Una fiamma scalda ancora il nostro vecchio cuore di terrestri. E in noi è ancora più forte la speranza che la paura. Grazie a Dio” .
