Carlo Collodi was born in Florence in 1826, in a long residential street narrow enough to block out most sunlight. To explain how such a strange tale came about, we need to look at the life story of its author. He begins to study hard and becomes a ‘good little kid’ and, at last, a real boy. Collodi actually ended his original Pinocchio magazine series with the wooden boy being hanged, until popular demand for his revival prompted the writer to find a way out for our puppet protagonist.Įven so, Pinocchio’s story then continues its series of bleak set-pieces until finally our hero learns not to run away from his responsibilities. Most shockingly of all, at one point Pinocchio is lynched from a tree by his recurring enemies, the Fox and the Cat. The first words Pinocchio speaks are ‘Please be careful! Do not hit me so hard!’ From the opening lines onwards, this is brutal stuff. His story begins not with life being breathed into a fully formed Pinocchio puppet, but with a piece of wood in a carpenter’s workshop which is both very much alive and very much keen not to be chopped up. The tale has been repeatedly sanitised by film adaptations over the years – although something of its original darkness has managed to survive into two new Pinocchio offerings from Disney+ and Netflix.įirst published in 1883, ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’ by Italian writer Carlo Collodi, had previously been serialised in a children’s magazine. ‘Most people exposed to the Disney version first will be shocked by the original story,’ explains Katia Pizzi, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute. Behind the schmaltz and sentimentality of most Pinocchio adaptations is a remarkably strange, and outrageously dark, 19 th century novel, drawn from the author’s tragic real-life childhood.
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