Carlo Collodi, "Le avventure di Pinocchio"

The Florentine Carlo Lorenzini (1826–1890), better known to the public of young and old with the name of Collodi, borrowed from his mother’s country, was a patriot of the wars of Independence but also a bookseller, reviewer, publisher. He translated French fairy tales, including Perrault’s most famous ones.

Divided between escapism and commitment, between caricatural satire of society and escape into the fairytale and fantasy, he wrote numerous texts but the most famous, the one for which he remained in the collective imagination, is The Adventures of Pinocchio, written in 1881 and published in 1883. With this novel, published in installments in the “Giornale per bambini”, he was able to create an immortal character, almost a Jungian archetype: the wooden puppet who becomes a child at the end of the story as a reward for good conduct, model of the tender hearted urchin, of the imaginative liar. The spread of the text has been enormous, since the rights of the work have expired, the translations in all the languages ​​of the world are innumerable. Many expressions in the book have become commonplace, such as laughing “a crepapelle” (from the scene of the snake dying from laughter) or “the lies have short legs and long noses”, or “acchiappacitrulli”.

Poised between romance and realism, between gothic-toned novel (see the hanging and the scary gravediggers rabbits) and the popular Dickensian miseries, it is essentially a picaresque narrative with moral intent. The story takes place in an unspecified place, north of Florence, in a poor country, animated by almost Verghian characters, who know a chronic hunger.

“Meanwhile, night began to fall, and Pinocchio, remembering that he hadn’t eaten anything, felt something in his stomach, which looked very much like appetite.

But the appetite in boys grows; and in fact after a few minutes the appetite became hunger, and the hunger, rapidly, turned into a huge hunger, a hunger to be cut with a knife.

Poor Pinocchio immediately ran to the hearth, where there was a pot that was boiling and made the act of uncovering it, to see what was inside, but the pot was painted on the wall. Imagine how he felt. His nose, which was already long, became at least four fingers longer.”

The painted pot is a symbol of a world of people who are ingenious and possess the imagination to make up for shortcomings and a life of hardship, who also find peels and cores good because it season them with the salt of appetite, who teach their children to put aside vices, whims and needs but, above all, it is a symbol of creative imagination, of freedom from contingent need.

Unlike the almost contemporary “Cuore” by Edmondo de Amicis, from 1886, the romantic tones are tempered and the moral warnings fused in the figures, characters, scenes, adventures. The book is all based on the two poles of order and disorder, between the anarchoid movement of the puppet and a static return to the ranks, between the main road of morality and the secondary paths of fantasy.

“If I had been a decent boy, like there are many; if I had wanted to study and work, if I had stayed at home with my poor father, now I would not be here, in the middle of the fields, playing the guard dog of a farmer’s house.”

The moral teaching, the education, the gendarmes, the judge, the blue fairy, the “poor father”, everything tends to instill guilt in the puppet, to bring him back to the right path, to reintegrate him into the system, to make him abandon childhood for maturity, for a gray becoming man. In the first version Pinocchio died, as a consequence of his foolishness and the novel ended with the hanging sequence. However, those same figures who fulfill the role of guide and moral direction are also highly caricatured and reveal the author’s intolerance for a certain type of rigid and suffocating education of the child’s talent. And, in fact, the reception of the text was not immediate, it was not recommended to read it to the children of a good family, in particular the involvement of the carabinieri provoked scandal.

But how much nostalgia does the reader, and also the author himself, feel for the very lively, lying puppet — where by lie we also mean the free deployment of a creative and redeeming fantasy out of a miserable reality — the puppet with mischievous eyes, with dancer’s legs, who wiggles his way out and chases troubles?

- And where did the old wooden Pinocchio hide?

“There he is,” replied Geppetto; and he pointed to a large puppet leaning against a chair, with his head turned to one side, with his arms dangling and his legs crossed and folded in the middle, it seemed a miracle if he was standing.

Pinocchio turned to look at him; and after he had looked at him a little, he said to himself with great complacency:

How funny, when I was a puppet! … and how happy I am now to have become a decent boy -

That Pinocchio is happy certainly does not show through the general melancholy of which the scene is enveloped, which hints at farewell, at funeral, in contrast with the cheerfulness of impertinent pranks and rebellions. Pinocchio tells the bigger lie to himself, denying his own nature to conform to an ideal that he doesn’t feel his but to which he bends for convenience and duty, for spirit of sacrifice and self-denial. Sacrifice, self-sacrifice, sense of duty that have been the only foundation of education for too long and which today, on the contrary, have disappeared into thin air.

The descent into the whale’s belly may appear to today’s readers as an obvious symbol but it was not so for those times. It would still have taken thirteen years for Freud to talk about psychoanalysis and the unconscious.

The language of the work is alive, popular, full of Florentinisms and proverbs which then entered the common language.

Pinocchio by Collodi was one of the most imitated books. A parallel literature also developed — almost a fanfiction — starring the puppet, which took the name of “Pinocchiate”. In 36 Tolstoy wrote an alternative version that differs greatly from the original. In 1940 Disney made it a famous cartoon transposition. Also noteworthy is the adaptation of “The fairy tales” by the Fabbri brothers, with the voice of Paolo Poli, Comencini’s 1972 drama and, more recently, Benigni’s film.