The tour comes from Sorbolo, follows the Cisa state road and passes through Brescello. Passage “In that slice of the Po Valley between the Po and the Apennines”as he wrote Giovannino Guareschi Which tells a small world made of genuine people, of cappelletti in broth and cured meats, of quarrels, spite, history and cinema. The world of Don Camillo and Peppone The protagonists, now almost eighty years ago, of that film masterpiece of Julien Divivier who still explains what cinema was still today and what should be. A dip in the past. The Po, the places, the statues that put two giants in front of them like Fernandel And Gino Cervi In a challenge between the Communist Party and the Christian Democracy that to see it today makes you smile but also leaves a little (a lot of regret and sweet melancholy for a politics and for a world with more style where elegance and good feelings housed.
Everything from these parts revolves around the communist mayor and the priest. All starting with a museum where the memorabilia, the posters, the photos, the Motorcycle of Peppone, the talented dress of Don Camillo, the bicycles used in the final scene of the third film, the sidecar are kept. The tour passes from Brescello with a sprint between via Allende and the statue of Don Camillo and then goes away straight to viadana. A stop with black and white photos, which ran away between countries and villages on the Via Emilia.
Via Emilia is Giovannino Guareschi’s road For a story that Don Camillo’s father and Peppone also wrote a little by bike on what is obviously not just a way of communication. “Between the Via Emilia and the West” sang Francesco Guccini because the Via Emilia is a symbol, a legend that tells many worlds, which tells people, lives, passions, perfumes, a way of life that today fights with factories and shopping centers and with traffic that risks suffocating everything. But the myth remains. For Guareschi, as the Po began in Piacenza, the ancient consular road was the one that began in Piacenza and went to Rimini. Only that: “The environment is a piece of the Po Valley and here it must be clarified that, for me, the Po begins in Piacenza.- Wrote Guareschi in his Small world– The fact that from Piacenza upwards is always the same river, does not mean anything: even the Via Emilia, from Piacenza to Milan, is always the same road; But the Via Emilia is the one that goes from Piacenza to Rimini. You cannot make a comparison between a river and a road because the roads belong to history and the rivers to geography … “.
Via Emilia is a piece of the soul that was. A casket of stories and poetry, a “pedaling” in history in a peripheral humanity, the humanity of the bass, who lives and works on the river, what seems not to count because it does not deal with places of power, which apparently does not make history but which is a humanity to look at with eyes full of amazement. A ride among the characters that Guareschi created in that Small world “Which is not a fixed place but is a black dot, which moves together with its peppons and its smilzes, up and down, along the Po, for that slice of land that is between the plain and the Apennines”. A real, concrete, large and at the same time petty humanity where there is room for everyone, good, less good, normal, strange, devils and even saints that such are even without perhaps knowing it. This is where the stories are intertwined. And here that the tour has passed. And here he won today Olaf Kooij. But for once it’s just a detail …