Pinocchio

The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le Avventure di Pinocchio) is a novel for children by Italian author Carlo Collodi. The first half was published in serial form between 1881 and 1883, and then completed as a book for children in February 1883. more...

It is about the mischievous adventures of Pinocchio, an animated marionette, and his poor father, a woodcarver named Geppetto. It is considered a classic of children's literature and has spawned many derivative works of art, such as Disney's classic 1940 animated movie of the same name, and commonplace ideas, such as a liar's long nose.

Background

The Adventures of Pinocchio is a story about an animated puppet, talking crickets, boys that turn into mules and other assorted fairy tale-like devices that would be familiar to a reader of Alice in Wonderland or Brothers Grimm—in fact earlier in his career Collodi worked on a translation of Mother Goose. However Pinocchio is not a traditional fairy-tale world, containing as it does the hard realities of the need for food, shelter and other basic measures of daily life, even the setting of the story is the very real Tuscan area of Italy. It was a unique literary melding of genres for its time.

Pinocchio draws from classical sources, such as Homer and Dante, but more significantly is a part of the Tuscan novella or short-story tradition which found its genesis in Boccaccio's Decameron (1353) — as Glauco Cambon wrote:

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