Carlo Collodi
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Carlo Lorenzini was born in Florence on November 24, 1826 and died there on October 26, 1890. He took his pen name, Collodi, from the Tuscan village his mother came from.
He was a newspaperman and a political journalist, not primarily a children's writer. He fought as a volunteer in the Tuscan army in the wars of Italian unification, founded satirical papers, worked as a theater critic and a civil servant, and came to writing for children comparatively late, first through translating French fairy tales into Italian.
Why he wrote it
The story began in 1881 as a serial in a children's newspaper, the Giornale per i bambini, under the title The Story of a Puppet. He wrote it in installments for money, and he did not think much of it.
He originally killed the puppet off, hanged it from an oak tree, and intended to stop there. Readers protested, the editor pressed him, and he resumed. The installments continued into 1883, when the whole was published as a book. That history explains the book's shape: episodic, abrupt, and far stranger than a planned novel would have been.
The book we publish, and why
We publish Pinocchio: The Tale of the Puppet because the original is tougher, funnier, and far more interesting than the softened version most people think they know.
This puppet is not charming. He is selfish, lazy, and a liar, and the world does not indulge him for a moment. He is robbed, cheated, imprisoned, worked as a watchdog, and turned into a donkey. Consequences land, and they land hard.
The benefit is that children feel the justice of it, which they do not get from sanitized versions. Work is what makes him real. Not a wish, not a reward for being likable, but work, and looking after someone other than himself. That is an unfashionable lesson, and children accept it without difficulty.
How to read it with a child
It suits reading aloud from about six, and independent reading from about eight. The episodic structure is a gift here: each installment was built to end on a hook, so it stops cleanly every few pages.
Warn yourself before you warn the child. There is real menace in it, particularly the Fox and the Cat, the hanging, and the Land of Toys where boys turn into donkeys and are sold. Most children take this in their stride and find it satisfying. A sensitive child may need the donkey chapters taken in daylight.
The question worth asking is not whether Pinocchio was naughty, which children answer instantly. Ask instead what it actually cost him, and who paid besides him. Geppetto is in nearly every answer.
Pair it with
- The Junior Genius Method, our approach of Read, Notice, Write, Recite, Remember, Question, Apply. Pinocchio is well suited to it because each episode poses one clear choice and one clear consequence.
- Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess, as a deliberate contrast: one child behaves well when everything is taken away, the other behaves badly while everything is given.
- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, for the parent rather than the child. Pinocchio is the argument that character is built by repeated acts, told as a story.
His works
- Fairy Tales, 1876. His Italian translations of Perrault and other French tales.
- Giannettino, 1877, and a series of school books following it.
- Minuzzolo, 1878.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, serialized from 1881, published as a book in 1883.
- Journalism and satire, from the 1850s onward, including the papers Il Lampione and Lo Scaramuccia, which he founded.
General reference on Carlo Collodi. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by Carlo Collodi