The Story of a Puppet first appeared in serial form, starting in 1881, in Giornale per i bambini, the Children’s Newspaper. He wrote political essays and satire for adults, and then, in his 50s, turned his attention to children. In the first half of the 19th century, a young boy named Carlo Lorenzini, originally from Florence, spent stretches of his childhood living here with relatives, and later, when he became a writer, he took Carlo Collodi as his pen name. It is probably fair to say they were tired. It’s hard to know what these laborers were thinking as they trudged back up the hill after a long day of working at the villa. It is where the working-class people lived, the ones who tended the nobility’s villa and gardens. The town is older than the villa and was probably originally built on the hilltop for purposes of strategic defense. Ascending its precipitously steep cobblestone main street, you come to a small piazza with communal sinks for laundry. Walk through the tunnel under the villa and follow the path up the hill, and the stone houses of Collodi speak to a very different reality. The garden, built as a kind of fantasy pleasure park for the Garzoni family and their noble guests, offers terraces, flower beds, grand staircases, splashing fountains and antique marble statues surrounding the Baroque villa. The plot is mostly one thing after another and the moralizing was a bit tedious and on the harsh side.The town of Collodi, Italy, about 45 miles west of Florence, is set on a slope behind a fabulous 17th-century villa. I wasn’t really pulled into the story though. Sometimes I felt sad for Pinocchio because he can’t catch a break, but he just doesn’t learn. The moral is the same every time: be a good boy or you’ll get hurt. There isn’t much plot to it, besides Pinocchio getting into trouble because he never listens and doesn’t think ahead, and ends up sad. The story is chopped up into 36 small chapters of only a few pages, and it is easy to read a few and put it away again. But the story was serialized in a paper and readers wanted more, so he extended the tale further. It was supposed to be a harsh lesson about that children should listen to their teachers and if something bad happens, they only have themselves to blame. Collodi ended the tale quickly by having Pinocchio hanged for his stupidity and die. The first edition was only a quarter of the length.
No explanation, it is just alive, we move on. Geppetto receives a piece of wood that is just alive, for one reason or another. It is also a bit bewildering when you are used to modern fantasy literature to read a fairy tale in which magic simply happens. A kind of typical Italian passion shines through in how the hot-tempered Pinocchio and Geppetto gesticulate at each other. The story is a bit dark and nasty, but frequently also comical. And Jiminy Cricket is no more than a six-legged insect without a hat, who is actually murdered by Pinocchio in the first scene and henceforth only there as a ghost. In the book though, Pinocchio is rather nasty and ugly, Geppetto is a hateful character and their relationship is a toxic codependency. We know Pinocchio as a naughty boy who occasionally tells lies, and his master Geppetto is a kindly old man. Disney greatly edited and abridged the story and made it sweeter. Only via Disney’s adaptation in 1940 did it enter international consciousness.Īs is so often the case with fairy tales and how we are familiar with them now, the original Pinocchio from 1883 is quite different from the Disney animation from 1940. Collodi died not long afterwards, before the story really gained in popularity. Even though their stories often gave harsh criticism of the societies of their times, they packaged their tales as children’s literature to sort of get away with it.Ĭollodi wrote Pinocchio late in life, after a lifetime of fighting in war and brooding on black-and-white ideas of morality. Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde wrote their stories in England, Hans Christian Andersen wrote The Little Mermaid in Denmark, the Grimm brothers rediscovered the old tales of Germany, and in Italy Carlo Collodi wrote Pinocchio. As a sort of backslash against the harsh growing industrialism that consumed the forests and mechanized people’s lives, a romanticism sprang up that lead to old men writing fairy tales. The end of the 19th century was a curious time for European literature.
An odd choice for a book to read? Let’s find out.
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