When the Communists were defeated in the 1948 Italian general election, Guareschi did not put his pen down but also criticized the Christian Democracy party.

The President is at the Quirinal Palace, surrounded by, instead of the presidential guard of honour (the corazzieri), giant bottles of Nebbiolo wine, which Einaudi actually produced on his land in Dogliani.

In 1954, Guareschi was charged with libel after he published two facsimile wartime letters from resistance leader and former Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi requesting that the Allies of World War II bomb the outskirts of Rome in order to demoralize Nazi German collaborators.

Guareschi declined to appeal the verdict and spent 409 days in Parma's San Francesco jail, and another six months on probation at his home.

[3] His most famous comic creations are his short stories, begun in the late 1940s, about the rivalry between Don Camillo, a stalwart Italian priest, and the equally hot-headed Peppone, Communist mayor of a Po River Valley village in the "Little World".

After an approach from Piers Dudgeon of Pilot Productions, the family authorised him to publish uncut translations into English of all the original 347 stories.