Guareschi’s Minor Fair

Guareschi is one of Italy’s best-selling authors worldwide (with over 20 million copies sold) and the most widely translated of all time.

The most famous character to come from Guareschi’s pen was Don Camillo, the parish priest constantly at odds with Peppone, the Communist mayor of his little world in the Po valley in Emilia.

In 1950, the fair’s house organ published a short, but brilliant report on the experience of a fair visitor, told with the humorous touch of "someone who sees today through the eyes of tomorrow”, as he himself liked to say of people who could make others laugh.
(The article appeared in «Fiera di Milano. Rassegna dell'Ente Autonomo Fiera». Year III. Number 2, April 1950.)

"The sun and sky seemed to have been deliberately made to demonstrate that the smartest stand at the Fair was the Factory of the Universe. But it needs to be considered how at the fair—rain, hail, or shine—everybody relaxes, shedding their usual frown to become more gracious."

"Even Chemistry—and if anything is grim and forbidding in this world, it is Chemistry, with all its abstruseness and ice-cold formulas—and yet, at the Fair even Chemistry relaxes and from its cheerful, festive pavilion smiles warmly even on the school pupil who was failed for not knowing the formula of sulphuric acid."

"So I was surprised, as I was saying, to meet a guy like that at the Fair, because he was such a frightfully gloomy man."

"‘What a load of rot!’ he grumbled at a certain point. ‘All that fanfare for nothing.’ I looked over at him as he seemed to be talking to me. ‘All that fanfare for nothing!’ he repeated. ‘Nothing where?’ ‘At this damn Fair!’ Now, I would think even the inhabitants of the remotest regions on the other side of the world must know about the Milan Fair."

"Ultimately, you could say everything is here at the Milan Fair, from the Diesel engine to patented shoelaces. I tried to explain this calmly to the little man, but the little man was sure of himself. ‘There’s nothing here’, he exclaimed."

"‘I couldn’t give a damn about transformers, suction-force pumps, television sets, ploughs, drinks cabinets, and refrigerators. I work in funeral transportation and if you can tell me where the coffin stand is, I’ll buy you a drink. That’s what interests me. So for me, there’s nothing here.’ The little man was furious, so I tried to calm him down. ‘You see, here it’s about industry…’"

"‘And manufacturing coffins isn’t an industry? What is it then, philosophy? If you have guys presenting packaging, with their patents and what-not, why shouldn’t you have guys presenting packaging for the deceased?’‘Well, in the goods packaging business there can be innovation, original developments, but in the coffin business there’s not much room for novelty,’ I said. ‘What innovations would you care to make to coffins?’”

"In the past, all you needed to bathe yourself was a basin and a piece of soap; to bathe yourself now you need fifty different contraptions and every day they invent something new. Now you tell me if to go six foot under these days you need anything more than you did one or two hundred years ago?...

... Nothing is done to make burial any more comfortable and so people die unwillingly and us funeral transportation people are the ones to suffer for it.’"

"It was a line of reasoning that worked on its own special logic; but still, it worked so I did not insist. But the heart of the matter is not this, it is not my encounter with that gloomy man. My point is that there is a Major Fair and there is a Minor Fair."

"The one made up of people like the little man who searched vainly for the death industry stand; of the little men and women who come from far and wide with a packed lunch in their bags, who eat in the shadows of the pavilions."

"It is the one where loudspeakers announce to distracted visitors that their dear little child, lost somewhere in the crowd, has been found and is waiting for them at this or that office. And this Minor Fair has its own smart poster, too, just like the Major Fair."

"The difference is simply that the Minor Fair’s poster is always the same, showing a lady struggling to open up a chair bed because a friend or relative has come from out of town, and now she has to put him up for the night since he could not find accommodation anywhere."

"... and then begins the endless parade of paper in Milan’s houses that brings the Fair into our homes and drags it out for at least another two months."

"Because this 'Minor' Fair is made up not only of that furious little man I spoke of earlier, for instance, but also of my wife, who after wandering around all day visiting thousands and thousands of stands packed with the marvels of industry."

"After seeing the most brilliant and astonishing things in the universe, gets home and says, ‘What a waste of time this year—I didn’t see a single decent egg beater. Last year the Fair was fantastic; do you remember that painkiller for toothaches with the rubber syringe you squeezed in your ear? It was amazing'."

"And there is no point trying to defend the geniality and creative force of national industry. ‘To beat eggs I need a good egg beater. I can’t beat them with an agricultural tractor or a crane. They can be the best agricultural tractors and the best cranes in the world, but when it comes to beating my eggs, they’re useless. So for me, this year’s fair was a complete failure.’"

"This is not to discourage the exhibitors at the Fair. They should carry on with their business with the same enthusiasm. If anything, besides agricultural tractors, Diesel engines, railway cars and so on, perhaps they could down to work on egg beaters.”