BBC Radio 4 Peter White’s intriguing foray into the world of Giovannino Guareschi (1908-68) and his most celebrated creation, the Italian priest Don Camillo (10 April) began in a trattoria in downtown Brescello. Here, a small army of Camillo-ites had assembled both to dine and to inspect a backdrop covered with stills from the cinema adaptations, before proceeding to the town’s museum. Among a wide range of choice artefacts there was a chance to inspect the bicycles on which our man and his adversary, the Communist mayor Peppone, had raced along the nearby dyke. Naturally, White reassured us, Camillo had won. But the point of Guareschi’s 350 or so stories about his adventures was that Camillo always came out on top, whether assembling a football team to take on a mayoral