Line #81 Literature/DonCamillo


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/doncamillo_1441.jpg]]
2	[[caption-width-right:350:Don Camillo (played by Creator/{{Fernandel}}) and Peppone (played by Creator/GinoCervi) in the 1950s-1960s films.]]
3
4	''Don Camillo'' is a series of successful and much beloved books, movies, TV shows and audio dramas about the [[FriendlyEnemy enmity and friendship]] between a Catholic priest and a Communist mayor in a small town in post-UsefulNotes/WorldWarII UsefulNotes/{{Italy}}.
5
6	The ''Don Camillo'' stories were written by Giovannino Guareschi starting in 1945 for his satirical magazine ''Candido'', and soon afterward compiled into books. The series is originally entitled ''Mondo piccolo'', referring to the "little world" of the villages and small towns in the Po valley near Parma. Most of the stories published in periodicals, and all of those that were anthologized into books, center on the hotheaded priest Don Camillo (who often talks to UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}}... and with Jesus talking back to him[[note]]According to the author, the voice of Jesus is his (the author's) conscience.[[/note]]) and his eternal rivalry with Giuseppe "Peppone" Bottazzi, the communist mayor of his little town. The town is not named in the stories, while in the films it is called Brescello after the one where the exterior shots were made. Both are authority figures for the town, both fought in the war together, and both like using their fists to decide their arguments. Most of the stories tell about the life in a small town, where everybody knows everybody, but many people do not like each other, which is pretty accurate as small towns go...
7
8	It is pretty much a historical document of a time when both the Italian Communist Party and the Roman Catholic Church had a grassroots-like basis in Italian society but were diametrically opposed to each other in quite a few teachings, but if you went down to their basics they were quite similar in many respects. Even if neither would have never admitted it to anyone.
9
10	The ''Don Camillo'' stories present this conflict on a smaller scale: a small, rural town in the Po valley. Both sides are represented by Don Camillo and his parishioners on the one side, and Peppone and his communists on the other. Of course even the most staunchly communist party member in Peppone's band still is a good Italian Catholic, and even if they might decry the church at every possible moment, they still will come to Don Camillo for everything important (baptisms, funerals, weddings...). Don Camillo on the other hand is not as staunchly against the Communist cause as some of his wealthiest parishioners would like: he sees the reasons why poor people turn to communism, and he decries the greed and avarice of the rich catholic landowners. "I don't listen to you, you're a Bolshevik priest!" one of them says when Don Camillo does not immediately take his side.
11
12	Don Camillo and Peppone go back a long time, and they make a show of not liking each other, for political reasons. On the other hand, they both appreciate and even respect each other, and neither of them actually can live without the other. When don Camillo is ReassignedToAntarctica at the end of the [[Film/LittleWorldOfDonCamillo first movie]], Peppone tries to get him back. Even if Peppone would never admit to that.
13
14	All that plays out in front of typical small town stories: most of the stories are rather short, light reading; the movies are mostly collections of stories, weaving together the short tales from the books with meandering plots. But often they also provide a biting commentary on social ills of the time, with a healthy dose of humour.
15	----
16	!!The franchise consists of:
17
18	[[AC:Books:]]
19
20	* ''Mondo Piccolo "Don Camillo"'' (''The Little World of Don Camillo'', 1948)
21	* ''Mondo Piccolo: Don Camillo e il suo gregge'' (''Don Camillo and His Flock'', 1953)
22	* ''Il Compagno Don Camillo'' (''Comrade Don Camillo'', 1963)
23	* ''Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi'' (in USA: ''Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children'', 1969, England: ''Don Camillo Meets Hell's Angels'', 1970)
24	* ''Gente così'' (1980)
25	* ''Lo spumarino pallido'' (1981)
26	* ''Noi del Boscaccio'' (1983)
27	* ''L'anno di Don Camillo'' (1986)
28	* ''Il decimo clandestino'' (1987)
29	* ''Ciao Don Camillo'' (1996)
30	* ''Don Camillo e Don Chichì'' (1996)
31
32	[[AC:Films:]]
33
34	* The 1950s-1960s movies starring Creator/{{Fernandel}} and Creator/GinoCervi:
35	[[index]]
36	** ''Film/LittleWorldOfDonCamillo'' (fr. ''Le petit monde de Don Camillo''/it. ''Don Camillo'')
37	** ''Film/TheReturnOfDonCamillo'' (fr. ''Le retour de Don Camillo''/it. ''Il ritorno di Don Camillo'')
38	** ''Film/DonCamillosLastRound'' (fr. ''La grande Bagarre de Don Camillo''/it. ''Don Camillo e l'onorevole Peppone'')
39	** ''Film/DonCamilloMonsignor'' (fr. ''Don Camillo Monseigneur''/it. ''Don Camillo monsignore ma non troppo'')
40	** ''Film/DonCamilloInMoscow'' (fr. ''Don Camillo en Russie''/it. ''Il compagno Don Camillo'')
41	[[/index]]
42	* A sixth film for the above series, fr. ''Don Camillo et les contestataires''/ it. ''Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi'' (''Don Camillo and the Red-Haired Girl''), was in the making in 1971 when Fernandel collapsed while shooting, due to a cancer he didn't know he had. [[invoked]][[DiedDuringProduction He died a month later, the movie unfinished]]. Out of respect for him, the studio completely remade the movie with different actors (Gino Cervi refused to make a new film without Fernandel) instead of showing the unfinished movie.
43	* ''The World of Don Camillo (it. Don Camillo)'' was a [[TheRemake remake]] by Creator/TerenceHill as director, producer and main actor, with his complete family in supporting roles.
44
45	[[AC:Live-Action Television:]]
46
47	* Creator/TheBBC made a TV series in 1980, with Mario Adorf as Don Camillo and Creator/BrianBlessed as Peppone.
48	* There is a [[ForeignRemake Colombian series]], which changes the setting to Colombia in the fifties.
49
50	[[AC:Radio Dramas:]]
51
52	* Creator/TheBBC made a radio drama series in 2001, starring starring Alun Armstrong as Don Camillo, John Moffatt as the Bishop, Shaun Prendergast as Peppone and Joss Ackland as Jesus.
53
54	[[AC:Comic Books:]]
55
56	* A comic-book adaptation authorized by Guareschi's children was launched in 2011. It is notable that every album also adapts a couple of the ''Mondo piccolo'' stories that do not contain Don Camillo or Peppone and that -- not least for copyright reasons -- the two main protagonists are not based on Fernandel and Gino Cervi, but on the author: Don Camillo was visually based on photographs of Guareschi as a clean-shaven young man, Peppone on the older, moustachioed Guareschi.
57
58	!!Tropes found in the ''Don Camillo'' series:
59
60	* ActionGirl: Don Camillo's niece Elisabetta in ''Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi'', a (former) member of a biker gang, parachutist and aggressive businesswoman. Due to her bulldozer-like qualities she is better known by her nickname Cat (short for Caterpillar).
61	* [[TheAllegedCar The Alleged Bicycle]]:
62	** Guareschi in a number of stories describes with great fondness the dilapidated kind of bicycles used in Italy between the wars and after 1945, at one point scoffing the lighter and more technologically advanced models used by city folk. For the narrator of the stories, a proper bicycle has to be heavy and dispense with such superfluous luxuries like complete pedals or fancy disc brakes. To get their bicycle to stop, users will often simply slide off the saddle and either sit on the fenderless back wheel or try to catch it between their knees.
63	** At some point in the books Peppone does have an [[TheAllegedCar alleged car]]: the narrator describes it as "the most broken-down Balilla of the Po valley, salvaged from the most rusty bunch of scraps of a junkyard and converted into a pick-up truck." People call it "the Sputnik".
64	* AlternateHistory: ''Il vittorioso'' (1950, "The Victorious"), one of the ''Mondo piccolo'' stories not collected into the books or adapted into film, has a plot that prefigures ''Film/GoodByeLenin'': Togno the farmer has a heart-attack when in the spring of 1943 he receives the news of his youngest, favourite son being killed in action while serving in the Italian army. In order to spare his feelings -- he does not want Giorgino to have died in vain -- and to prevent him from having another, fatal heart-attack, his family keeps feeding the bedridden Togno stories of Axis successes while in actual fact Italy is invaded by the Allies, Mussolini is deposed etc. The story ends as communist partisans enter the village to the cheers of the populace, with Togno dying happily after his children told him the cheers were in response to the news that German, Italian and Japanese forces had just taken New York.
65	* AuthorAvatar: To some extent Jesus on the crucifix. As Guareschi explained in the foreword to the first book, if priests feel offended because of Don Camillo or Communists because of Peppone, they can take it out on him with all sorts of violence,
66	-->[...] but if someone feels offended because of Christ's talk, there is nothing to be done. He who speaks in my stories is not Christ, but ''my'' Christ, that is: the voice of ''my'' conscience.
67	* BackToSchool:
68	** In one of the first published stories and the [[Film/LittleWorldOfDonCamillo first movie]], after Peppone is first elected to mayor, he and his comrades (who are mostly ill-educated peasants and craftsmen) go to take evening classes from the old village schoolmarm. She however refuses to accept Peppone as a student because she can remember too many of his youthful pranks.
69	** In the third movie, there is one arc where Peppone has to take the primary school finals because he missed them/never made it past third grade (equivalent to fifth grade in US schools). He's so nervous he almost fails. Don Camillo trades the correct solutions for political concessions.
70	* BadassPreacher: Don Camillo is the quintessential example in European fiction. He has no problems clobbering a dozen comrades or throwing a table at them for mocking him, nor does he have any problem threatening the communist mayor and his gang with a submachine gun to obtain funding for his kindergarten project.
71	* BarbarianLonghair: The bikers, including Peppone's youngest son, Michele (Veleno). He later experiences a TraumaticHaircut, leading into a FakeHairDrama.
72	* BoltOfDivineRetribution: Don Camillo argues with Jesus until there's a roll of thunder, then he backs down (although Camillo was in the wrong on that one).
73	* BookDumb: Peppone dropped out of school after third grade and is literate only in the most technical sense. That doesn't in any way stop him from coherently and eloquently arguing some rather obscure points of Communist doctrine, getting re-elected as Mayor four times, turning his flagging blacksmith's shop into a successful auto repair business and out-scheming the far more intellectual Don Camillo on a fairly regular basis.
74	* BrickJoke: Early on in the third movie, Don Camillo uses a fake 5000 Lire bill to buy one of Peppone's communist news papers. The bill is forgotten about afterwards until, at the end of the movie, Peppone hands it back to Don Camillo as 'payment' for Don Camillo helping him carry his suitcase.
75	* CanonDiscontinuity: Despite nominally part of the series the 6th movie is mostly forgotten by fans. This goes so far that some countries (e.g. Germany) plainly refused to import the movie at all.
76	* CharlesAtlasSuperpower:
77	** Don Camillo hits stronger than a professional boxer. He can also lift tables weighing more than 200 kg and throw them with ease.
78	** Peppone is Don Camillo's equal (or nearly equal) as far as pure strength is concerned, but the priest has a bit of an edge through his better technique. It's not just technique, it's also faith. Several times, when Don Camillo is overtaken by righteous anger or a simple need to do the right thing, he'll perform feats of strength even more incredible than his regular ones. Every once in a while, the same happens with Peppone.
79	* ChekhovsSkill: Or rather lack of. When the flood starts to threaten the village in the second film (''The Return of Don Camillo''), Peppone asks Don Camillo if he can swim. Don Camillo replies, [[SarcasmMode "Hah! Like an iron."]] Later, when there's a metre of water in the church, and [[spoiler:the bell tower collapses and knocks out Don Camillo, Peppone saves him from drowning]].
80	* TheCoatsAreOff: Every time characters settle things with their fists, i.e. often. They also roll up their sleeves.
81	* CoffinContraband: Partisan leader Peppone and village priest Don Camillo collude to hide a lot of incriminating weapons this way, once from the German occupiers and once from their British liberators, who are keen for the partisans to disarm and disband.
82	* {{Confessional}}: The very first Don Camillo story is called "The Confession". Peppone confesses to Don Camillo that he hit him over the head with a club. It would neither be the last story featuring a confession, nor the last time someone used that gambit on Don Camillo, despite the way it turned out in this one.
83	* {{Conscription}}: Michele is in the age of being drafted. He ponders about DraftDodging [[spoiler:but instead applies to the Paratroops.]]
84	* ContinuityReboot: Terrence Hill, back then Italian/European megastar and fan of the original movies, tried to make a reboot nearly on his own... alas, despite Don Camillo now riding a spiffy Motocross bike and having rollerblade parties in his church it never went anywhere.
85	* CycleOfRevenge: Between the families of Ciro (Communist) and Filotti (clerical) in the story ''Juliet and Romeo'' (adapted in the [[Film/LittleWorldOfDonCamillo first movie]], see "Star-Crossed Lovers"). Interestingly the cycle actually amounts to a de-escalation, as it begins in 1908 when Filotti shoots Ciro with buckshot when he threatens a priest at mass during a general strike, but eventually retribution and conflicts between successive generations always lead to ritualized fistfights between the two family patriarchs.
86	* DangerouslyCloseShave: In the second film, one of Peppone's men, a barber, brags that if Don Camillo ever had the nerve to cross his threshold, he would get one of those. When Don Camillo hears about it, he comes in to get shaved, and leaves unscathed. In the original books, the barber is a murderer (he killed a farmer accused of having killed a communist, so he claims he was acting on revenge) and Don Camillo [[BlindedByRage is actively taunting him]], trying to get him so compromised that not even the whole Communist Party can cover his tracks anymore. He succeeds.
87	* DirtyCommunists: Don Camillo and his parishioners consider Peppone and the communist villagers like this.
88	* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: In the second movie, Don Camillo carries his old parish's cross up a steep hill to the village in the mountains. In heavy rain. Then heavy snow.
89	* DownerEnding: A few of the short stories have these, e. g. that of one inhabitant of the town who was deported to Germany during the war and there fell in love a German girl who had lost her entire family in an air raid. However, because the German forces in Italy had shot two of the boy's brothers, the family would never accept a German daughter-in-law. In the end the girl poisons herself and all Don Camillo can do is to make sure that the child of the "unknown" dead woman is adopted by the boy's family.
90	* DrinkingContest: In ''Film/DonCamilloInMoscow'' mayor Peppone engages in one of those with a Soviet official to stall for time so don Camillo can get back to the hotel before the Russians discover that he is missing. When don Camillo finally gets back he is shocked to find out that Peppone actually won the contest against a Russian - and is dead drunk with a side of dead.
91	* DueToTheDead: Peppone, Communist die-hard that he is, not only sticks up for Signora Christina's right to have her coffin draped in the flag of the Italian monarchy, he also threatens to kick the ass of anyone who starts anything over it, and is one of the pall-bearers (dressed in the red scarf he wore as a partisan, no less.)
92	* EscalatingWar: In classic slapstick fashion, when Peppone does something to Don Camillo, the priest retaliates and it goes on and on.
93	* FieryRedhead: Don Camillo's niece Cat.
94	* FriendlyEnemy: Don Camillo and Peppone can't live with each other, but they also can't live without each other. They might fight each other all the time, but it's for ideological and/or political rather than personal reasons. Peppone even names his son after don Camillo (after a fistfight).
95	* GodwinsLaw: Subverted, as in the heat of the moment opposing characters show no hesitation to call each other fascists, e. g. Peppone sarcastically calling Don Camillo "Duce" and Gina Filotti needling Peppone by referring to him as ''podestà'' - the term for "mayor" under Fascism - instead of ''sindaco''.
96	* GoneHorriblyRight: Don Camillo attempts to distract Peppone's parliamentary election speech by playing a military march on the public audio system of the church. [[spoiler:Peppone indeed gets distracted - his diatribe becomes a patriotic speech, which ensures the Communists the victory in the election, and a representative's seat for Peppone in the Italian parliament.]]
97	* GoneSwimmingClothesStolen: Happens to Don Camillo in the first book, and the fourth movie (he arranges a revenge later on the culprit, a communist woman, with the help of her husband).
98	* GoodShepherd: When Don Camillo is [[ReassignedToAntarctica reassigned to a small village in the mountains]] in the second movie, his old parishioners do not react well to the new priest. They go as far as [[BeyondTheImpossible not dying on their deathbed]] because they want Don Camillo to give them the last rites. [[WeWantOurJerkBack Even Peppone and his comrades find themselves wishing he'd come back.]]
99	* HauntingTheGuilty:
100	** In "The Dog", Don Camillo and Peppone investigate the mystery of a stray dog which spooks the locals with its blood-curdling nightly howl. They discover the dog is howling each night over a large bag caught in the river reeds which upon inspection is found to contain a decomposing human body. Don Camillo infers that the man in the bag was murdered and dumped into the river, and the victim's dog has been following the corpse floating down the river ever since. The body cannot be identified and the crime is not cleared up, but the narration closes with the assurance that there are certain people (obviously meaning the perpetrators and accomplices of the murder) who still hear the dead man's dog's howling each night, and will do so for the rest of their lives. It is left ambiguous whether those who keep hearing the howl are being supernaturally haunted, or just being tortured by their conscience.
101	** In "Nocturne With Bells" Don Camillo is approached by a man called Biondo who confesses that during the partisan war he murdered a man for his money, but let it look like a politically motivated killing. Though Biondo asserts that he doesn't regret the killing at all, and even though he is legally clear thanks to Italy's postwar amnesty, he desperately wants Don Camillo to absolve him of his sin because each night after nightfall he can see the dead man standing beside his bed.
102	* HearingVoices: Don Camillo hears the voice of Jesus himself and he often has conversations with him whenever he is close to the crucifix of his church (and even with the Virgin Mary once in the [[Film/LittleWorldOfDonCamillo first movie]]). The Christ does not respond to him when he is overwhelmed by anger though, nor when he's done something really stupid.
103	* HeelRealization: Don Camillo has a moment of this when he graffitis "Peppone is a donkey" regarding the mayor's spelling mistakes on his mural newspaper. Jesus, less-than amused, points out that mocking the guy for being BookDumb (having to work instead of going to school) is a [[SarcasmMode most witty insult indeed]], and Don Camillo makes it up by proofreading Peppone's next proclamation.
104	* {{Hypocrite}}:
105	** Don Camillo is not above this when trying to one-up Peppone; when his soccer team gets beaten by Peppone's, he throws the corrupt referee out of his church after he admitted he had been bribed by the mayor. Jesus of course points out that Don Camillo did the same. Peppone just paid more.
106	** This also happens with Peppone a few times, e. g. when Don Camillo is sent off to the village in the mountains, he lets it be known to the parishioners that none of them should dare to show up to send him off from the railway station. And then [[HypocriticalHeartwarming he and his comrades show up to send him off themselves]].
107	* ItsRainingMen: Cat picks up skydiving, as her father had been a paratrooper in WWII. Peppone's son Michele (Veleno) then applies to Italian airborne...
108	* JesusWasWayCool: In a gentle, ReasonableAuthorityFigure (though only Camillo hears) way.
109	* KickedUpstairs: In [[Film/DonCamilloMonsignor the fourth movie]], Don Camillo and Peppone have been promoted to Bishop and Senator respectively and both moved to Rome. It is mentioned however this was done purely to get them out of the village since they kept causing trouble there. This was [[SnapBack undone]] for the fifth movie, where they are both back in the village in their old positions as priest and mayor.
110	* KnownOnlyByTheirNickname: This being rural Italy, many characters are known only by their nicknames.
111	** The most obvious case is Peppone, which is an augmentative, i.e. "large form" of "Giuseppe" in Italian, meaning literally "Big Joe". There's only one instance of anyone calling Peppone "Giuseppe" in the 368 short stories, although he does sometimes sign e. g. proclamations as "Giuseppe Bottazzi" or "Giuseppe Bottazzi, called Peppone". When someone calls Peppone "comrade Bottazzi", it's either an outsider or Don Camillo taking the mickey out of him.
112	** The real names of Peppone's recurring sidekicks Bigio ("the grey one"), Brusco ("the harsh one") and Smilzo ("the skinny one") are never even mentioned.
113	* LaxativePrank:
114	** A number of short stories reference the Fascist signature practice of forcing their political enemies to drink castor oil. One story features Dario Camoni, who back in the day had forced both young communist Peppone and young cleric Don Camillo to drink a glass of castor oil each; then, when Dario Camoni makes a reappearance after the way, Peppone tries to get his own back... with mixed results.
115	** In another story, when two Maoists bad-mouth Peppone, his son Michele becomes so incensed that he forces them to drink a glass of... cod-liver oil each. Peppone is almost relieved: "God be praised, at least they can't say I raised a fascist son!"
116	* LiteralAssKicking:
117	** "Lord," groaned Don Camillo, clasping his hands and looking up at the crucifix, "my hands were made for blessing... but not my feet!"
118	** Peppone also resorts to this every now and then, especially when one of his men has done something stupid.
119	* LivingStatue: In "The Fear Persists" Don Camillo, who has learned the identity of the killer in an unsolved case of murder in a confession, is applying varnish to the large wooden crucifix on the main altar of his church when he suddenly has the impression that the statue's hand comes alive and touches his forehead to push it back. At the same time, a gunshot is fired into the church through a window (presumably the murderer trying to eliminate an unwanted witness). Moments later Don Camillo realizes that the bullet has pierced the hand of Christ. Though Christ insists that Don Camillo is "fantasizing", it is strongly implied that Christ's statue saved Don Camillo's life by pushing his head aside.
120	* MirrorCharacter: Don Camillo and Peppone are both pugnacious, scheming, corrupt and unsophisticated, but generous and fundamentally decent people, who take their obligations to their people and town seriously and have a soft spot for sob stories. The only point where they really clash is politics (and even on that topic they don't clash as often as one might expect; Peppone has a great deal of respect for Don Camillo's social work, and Don Camillo regularly sides with Peppone when he thinks the local landowners are getting too greedy and full of themselves). Of course, if you were to point this out to them they would vehemently deny it.
121	* MoralityPet:
122	** Peppone's second-youngest son is often what keeps Don Camillo from going too far with his vendettas against him, and in more than one occasion his innocent pleas convince the priest to help his father when he really needs it.
123	** Jesus to Don Camillo.
124	* NewYearHasCome: The custom of "killing the year" (by shooting guns in the air at midnight on New Year's Eve) is mentioned once or twice in the short stories. On one occasion, Don Camillo, who doesn't like the custom much, gets his old M91 Carcano rifle and shoots once. Shortly after, Peppone knocks on his door to say that the hammer and sickle emblem over the "House of the People" got knocked out randomly by one of the shots fired, [[SarcasmMode how about that for a coincidence]]. Before going back home he asks Don Camillo how many shots it took.
125	* NotEvenBotheringWithTheAccent:
126	** Played with. Fernandel was voiced over by Carlo Romano in the Italian version for the most part, but in the French version ''everybody'' talks with South Eastern France (Marseilles and Provence) accents throughout the whole series, even though the story is set in Northern Italy.
127	** Taken to the extreme in the French dub of ''Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi'' (1972), the film that was made shortly after Fernandel died. Everybody has the Marseilles/Provence accent once again despite Fernandel (the reason everyone had that accent in the previous films) not being there anymore.
128	** In the British 2001 radio version, everyone except Jesus had a Yorkshire accent.
129	* ObfuscatingStupidity: Peppone falls between this and CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass. Although at the start of the series he is barely literate and generally appears intellectually inferior to Don Camillo, he outsmarts him on occasion and proves a competent mayor (to the point that he's re-elected four times - his last re-election is in 1966). Guareschi points out in his narrative that Peppone was a son of a farmhand and had to go to work early in his life to support his family. He also was [[{{conscription}} conscripted]] to UsefulNotes/FirstWorldWar, effectively denying him the chance of an education. At one point, after a particularly effective election campaign by the Christian Democrats, it seems that he is going to be ousted from power, but he turns the tables with an honest and deceptively simple speech that sounds almost like a concession of defeat, asking voters to treat the election as a verdict on how good a job he and his comrades did. On hearing this, even Don Camillo votes for him and he is re-elected by a huge margin. In his private life Peppone also proves very adaptable: originally a blacksmith, he becomes a highly skilled car mechanic in the 1930s and by ''Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi'' his business has expanded into a big emporium selling everything from cars to refrigerators (partly thanks to convincing his comrades to become stockholders in his company).
130	* OddNameOut: Everyone in Peppone's gang (including Peppone) is pretty much OnlyKnownByTheirNickname: Brusco, Smilzo, Bigio... except Stràziami.
131	* OneSteveLimit: Averted in the books (in the original Italian) with Fulmine, aka Ful, don Camillo's dog, and Antenore Cabazza, also called Fulmine (which means "lightning"), who is one of Peppone's men. The narrator lampshades it and points out that, out of the two, the one with the most brains is the dog. On the other hand, the English version enforces the trope by calling the dog "Thunder" and the man "Thunderer".
132	* PalsWithJesus: Don Camillo often has conversations with Jesus himself whenever he is close to the crucifix of his church (and even with the Virgin Mary once in the [[Film/LittleWorldOfDonCamillo first movie]]). The Christ does not respond to him when he is overwhelmed by anger though, nor when he's done something really stupid.
133	* PreachersKid: In ''Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi'', Don Camillo is forced to take in his troublemaking niece Cat--youthful rebel, lover of beat music, and ringleader of a biker gang--as her family hopes that her conservative uncle and a rural environment will "set her straight". Initially Cat behaves as provocative as possible in the hopes that Don Camillo will throw her out; when this fails, Cat seems to undergo a change of heart and starts to dress conservatively, goes to church, and has long conversations about religion with Don Camillo's young auxiliary priest Don Chichì. Her spotless record is only tainted when she confides in Don Camillo that she is pregnant, prompting him to give her money so she can move out and start a business of selling consumer electronics out of a van. This goes well because Cat's business is the only one in town to compete with Peppone's, securing her the local conservative customers who resent buying from the communist Peppone. Her livelihood secured, she asks her priestly uncle to hear her confession, which is that she has feigned her religious leanings to manipulate Don Chichì, that she faked pregnancy in order to blackmail Don Camillo to give her money, and that she is really Peppone's business partner and only pretending to be his competitor in order to fool the conservatives who believe they are hurting Peppone by buying from the parson's niece. Her confession ends with the affirmation that she actually regrets nothing of this.
134	* RedOniBlueOni: Peppone is Red to Don Camillo's Blue. Although it's not uncommon for them to swap places.
135	* ReasonableAuthorityFigure: Both Peppone and Don Camillo.
136	* ReassignedToAntarctica: After lashing out a bit ''too'' much, Camillo is reassigned to a small village in the mountains in [[Film/TheReturnOfDonCamillo the second movie]]. Where it is constantly snowing, no car can go, and the parishioners don't really like him. In the short stories he ends up getting sent "in exile" four or five times.
137	* RecycledPremise: In the story ''Giulietta e Romeo'', in which ultra-Catholic Gina Filotti and communist Mariolino from the Bruciata fall in love, Guareschi takes a break to lampshade the trope and explain that while in the cities people are obsessed with living original lives that are different from the way things used to be, people in the country don't give a hoot if they happen to find themselves living as characters in a rehash of ''Theatre/RomeoAndJuliet'' or ''Literature/TheBetrothed'' or ''Theatre/CavalleriaRusticana''.
138	* LaResistance: Both Don Camillo and Peppone were antifascist partisans in the war and fought on the same side. They still were bickering though.
139	** In the books, Don Camillo wasn't exactly a partisan, although he did hide people from the Germans and celebrated Mass for the partisans in the mountains (and kept a lot of weapons and ammunition). Guareschi also does not romanticize the ''Guerra Clandestina'' - some ex-partisans are shown to have used the war as a pretext to settle private scores, to steal and even murder. However Peppone and his group are portrayed as having behaved honorably (apart from stealing a coopful of chickens to celebrate victory). For instance, they did get their hands on a treasure stolen by the Germans (on the rationale that otherwise the British soldiers in the area would have taken it), but used it entirely to build the House of the People and Don Camillo's kindergarten for the good of the entire town. Granted, they only used the treasure to build Don Camillo's kindergarten under the threat of a sub-machine gun, but otherwise they would have used all of the money for the House of the People, not for themselves.
140	* RippedFromTheHeadlines:
141	** Giovanni Guareschi had his "little world" face the serious floods in the Po Valley in late 1951.
142	** A number of stories were based on real-life news stories, such as "The Baptism" (after a priest who refused to baptize a child "Lenin"), and "The Egg and the Hen" (after reports of an egg showing a relief image of a sacred host). Worldwide historical events like the Atlantic Pact, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution or the Sputnik launch also loom large in the context of some stories.
143	* SnarkToSnarkCombat: Every conversation between Don Camillo and Peppone. Although they occasionally drop the snark and go into SincerityMode.
144	* SparedByTheAdaptation: In the second film, bad blood between Peppone and Cagnola (a CompositeCharacter) causes their sons to start a war, too, until Cagnola's boy throws a stone at Peppone's boy's head and gravely injures him. In the film, things stop there. In the short story, the boy who threw the stone takes refuge on a transmission tower because he's terrified he's killed his classmate; when he sees policemen in the distance he tries to climb even higher but loses his strength and falls into the river.
145	* StandingBetweenTheEnemies: Played with in "The Dance of the Hours". Things between Don Camillo and Peppone escalate quickly and both grab a bench to clobber the other with; one of Peppone's men, Smilzo, is the only one who keeps his head and tries in vain to stop Peppone until he's right between the two benches. The fight is broken up by something entirely unrelated, and Smilzo is left standing alone in the middle of the square. Then, since nobody's watching, he goes [[INeedAFreakingDrink to get himself a Coca-Cola]].
146	* StarCrossedLovers: The lovers from the [[Film/LittleWorldOfDonCamillo first movie]]: [[FeudingFamilies One is from a rich Catholic family, and one from a poor Communist family. Both families living next to each other and fighting all the time]]. Of course both fall in love, and in the end they try to commit suicide together. Even with a shout out to Theatre/RomeoAndJuliet in the narration, the story is clearly copied from Ovid's ''[[Myth/ClassicalMythology Pyramus and Thisbe]]'' (they are separated by a wall with a crack in it). In the book, however, it is not a wall, but a wire-mesh fence with a hole in it that separates the two farms.
147	* StealthHiBye: ''Inverted'' by Peppone at the end of the third film. Don Camillo is watching the train depart with Peppone (who's just been elected senator and had to leave for Rome) on it, looking sad and angry... Except Peppone somehow got off the train and pops up behind him.
148	* TheToothHurts: One of the short stories ("A Tooth for a Tooth") begins with "''Peppone was the kind of man who isn't afraid of anything or anyone, capable of laughing in front of a machine gun, but who, when he had to go to the dentist, trembled and needed his wife or a friend to go with him.''" So Peppone, half-crazy from the toothache, goes to the city to find a dentist. Unfortunately for him, the one he finds turns out to be a former Fascist who distinctly remembers getting kicked out by Peppone in '43...
149	* TrainStationGoodbye: Two of the films - the first and the third - end on this trope.
150	** In the [[Film/LittleWorldOfDonCamillo first film]], Don Camillo has to leave his village after a fistfight against the Communists; in retaliation Peppone forbids everyone to see him off at the station. At the next station, Don Camillo finds his parishioners massed on the platform to tell him goodbye. Then, at the station after that, he finds Peppone and his comrades, and Peppone promises him his replacement won't last long and he'll be able to come back soon.
151	** The ending of the third film reverses the situation, as Peppone, having been elected to the Italian Parliament, has to choose between being an MP and a mayor. He chooses the former and takes the train to Rome; Don Camillo is at the next station to say goodbye and a sharp YouCantGoHomeAgain speech. [[spoiler:This time the trope is subverted, as Peppone gets off the train at the last minute, having decided he'd rather be a mayor in his own village than an MP in Rome.]]
152	* VitriolicBestBuds: Don Camillo and Peppone are between this and WithFriendsLikeThese.
153	* WeWantOurJerkBack: One of Don Camillo's short stories dealt with him being [[ReassignedToAntarctica reassigned to a town in the mountains]], and being replaced with a young, nice priest. Most of the town - including Peppone - soon ask the bishop to have Don Camillo come back.
154	* WildHair: Michele (Veleno).
155	* WorthyOpponent: When the townspeople complain about Don Camillo beating up the comrades from the city, one can't be really sure if they are complaining or bragging about him.
156	* YouKilledMyFather: Theme of at least two stories, one involving Cat.
157	* YouWouldntShootMe: In an early story and the [[Film/LittleWorldOfDonCamillo first film]], there's an agricultural strike at one of the big farms and the cows spend a day and a night without food or water. At some point Don Camillo has enough, and tries to sneak through the strikers and enforcers to feed the cows. Peppone catches him, and when Don Camillo states his intention he threatens to shoot him.
158	-->''"Peppone is stubborn like a pig-headed mule," said calmly Don Camillo, "but he doesn't shoot at the backs of poor priests who do what God commanded them to do."'' (Unlike some examples of this trope, Peppone doesn't shoot him (of course) but keeps his gun. For the time being.)

Context Literature / DonCamillo