A few days before Christmas 1946, Giovannino Guareschi, editor of the conservative weekly newspaper Candido (Milan), felt acutely stressed in trying to meet an impending deadline; he needed to send his proofs to final printing but several inches of copy remained blank. Luckily, he had written a short tale about a Catholic priest named Don Camillo and Peppone, a Communist mayor, destined for the magazine Oggi, and, at the last minute, he placed it instead in his own newspaper, giving it the title “Peccato confessato” (“A Sin Confessed”) for a column named Mondo piccolo (Little World) (Guareschi, Qui si spiega, in quattro parole vi – viii). This harried start led to the most successful expression of Italian serialized fiction in the twentieth century. Over the next two decades, Guareschi would write another 345 tales involving...
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Citation: Perry, Alan. "Mondo Piccolo". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 September 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=34168, accessed 09 June 2026.]
