One day I found The Little World of Don Camillo (1950) at the St. Pius Catholic Church book sale: a small, yellow collection of short stories, illustrated by cute, half-naked angels and devils.
I had never read anything like this before. There were lots of stories about boys in love with boys, or teenagers with adult men, but never two adults! And one was a tall, muscular Catholic priest who assaulted people with candlesticks! And the other, a Communist!
The small yellow hardback remained on my bookshelf for several years before vanishing; I think my mother accidentally put it in a "to donate" pile.
Peppone is married, but his wife and children rarely appear. And almost none of the stories involve the hetero-romance of other characters. Often they involve a conundrum that requires Don Camillo and Peppone to work together:
Don Camillo returns to the boxing ring to save the town's honor.
Don Camillo and Peppone are stuck on a ferris wheel.
Peppone is lost in the mountains, and Don Camillo must rescue him.
During the next twenty years, Don Camillo and Peppone grow into middle age, and though they remain "enemies," their love for each other shines through more often than not. In the last volume of the series, Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children (1969), a young, hip priest has come to town, and butts heads with Peppone's hippie son, and the cycle begins anew.
The French-Italian movie Don Camillo (1952) starred Fernandel as Don Camillo and Gino Cervi as Peppone (above), and Franco Interlenghi (left) as the young hunk who requires their assistance. Four sequels appeared.
The author, political satirist Giovanni Guareschi (1908-1969), was a conservative Catholic, and probably heterosexual -- he also published humorous stories about his wife and children. I wonder what he would have thought if he knew that his books had a strong gay subtext.
A minor correction-- I believe that Peppone was already a "godless Communist" already while fighting Nazis with Don Camillo. The "partigiani" or partisans of the Italian Resistenza included members of the "Partito Comunista Italiano" (the Communist Party, or "P.C.I."), the "Democrazia Cristiana" (the D.C. or the Christian Democrats, a moderate Catholic party founded in '43), and of many conservative Catholic priests and laypeople. While they fought together against a common enemy during the war, after WWII the D.C. became became Italy's dominant political party, with the PCI as its biggest rival.
ReplyDeleteSo yes, Don Camillo and Peppone's rivalry and friendship came from the same bonding experience, fighting Nazis and trying not to be killed.