Don Camillo is the main character created by the Italian writer and journalist Giovannino Guareschi (1908-1968), and is based on the historical Roman Catholic priest, WW II partisan and detainee of the concentration camps of Dachau and Mauthausen, Don Camillo Valota. Don Camillo is one of two protagonists, the other being the communist mayor of the town, known to everyone as Peppone. The stories are set in what Guareschi refers to as a "small world" and are an excellent representation of what rural Italy was like after the second world war. Most of the Don Camillo stories came out in the weekly magazine Candido, founded by Guareschi with Giovanni Mosca. These "Little World" ("Mondo Piccolo") stories amounted to 347 in total and were put together and published in eight books, only the first three of which were published when Guareschi was still alive.
Read more about Don Camillo: Characterisation, Books in Chronological Order, Bibliography
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“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)