Don Camillo Meets Hells Angels by Giovanni Guareschi

This is the story of a clash between young and old, change and tradition, skeptics and believers. Don Camillo and his old enemy the Communist mayor, Peppone, are at grips with life in the sixties. They have both grown old, and have to come to terms with the problems of The Italian Economic Miracle in which old landmarks are swept away and the world is dominated by cars and motorcycles, refrigerators and washing machines, and also a rebellious youth, the teppisti, who view them as living corpses.

Don Camillo is now assisted by a preposterous curate, full of new ideas from the Ecumenical Council.

Peppone, the mayor who runs a motorcar business, produces the old rhetorical slogans of the Communist party of his youthful days, and is pestered by the new woman chemist and her doctor husband who are filled with the ideas of Italian Communism today and profess sympathies for Mao.

But both Don Camillo and Peppone are pestered by the new youth.

Guareschi uses his novel to satirize all kinds of aspects of the technological revolution in Italy today. There are hilarious misunderstandings not only between young and old but between Don Camillo, his curate and the fine arts commission, and local authorities who quarrel with public authorities about the ownership of his altar and cross.

But although the element of satire is strong in the novel, giving it an added depth of interest, it is the charm and humour of the characters on both sides of the age-barrier that will appeal most to the vast readership that has enjoyed the Don Camillo books over the last twenty years.

Giovanni Guareschi died suddenly in July 1968. The manuscript of this book was found some months later. It will be the last Camillo book to appear.