How I met Don Camillo

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Don Camillo and me

I bought the book at the secondhand table of a church bazaar, almost 40 years ago; I’ll bet I paid a quarter.  And I’m still not sure exactly what it was about that serious-looking, yellow-jacketed volume that caught the attention of an adolescent girl whose normal reading fare ran to romances and Nancy Drew. Consider: they were translated Italian stories, a decade or two old, set in an utterly alien post-war period and featuring such unusual characters as a hot-tempered Catholic priest, a not-unsympathetic Communist politician, and a talking Crucifix. It was the early 1970’s, and I was an unsubtle 12- or 13-year-old Protestant American kid. A bookworm, sure, but not widely read enough to get the cover blurb’s reference to the author as “an Italian James Thurber.” So I wonder why, after quickly glancing at the inside flap and turning a few pages, I didn’t just put it down and head to the cashier with my other, more predictable choice, Anne of Green Gables?