Carlo Collodi

Carlo Collodi (1826–1890) was a Florentine journalist and satirist who took his pen name from a village. He was born Carlo Lorenzini; Collodi, in Tuscany, was his mother’s home and where he spent much of his childhood, and he first signed himself with it in 1860.

He was sent to a seminary, decided against the priesthood, and from 1844 worked in a Florentine bookshop. He volunteered with the Tuscan army in the wars of independence of 1848 and 1860, founded the satirical paper Il Lampione, which the Grand Duke of Tuscany shut down, and followed it with Lo Scaramuccia. He was also a censor of theatre for the state.

Children’s writing reached him by way of translation. Disenchanted with Italian politics after unification, he translated Perrault into Italian in 1875 and wrote the Giannettino schoolbooks, which taught the new country to its children through a good-for-nothing boy. Storia di un burattino began in the Giornale per i bambini on 7 July 1881 and broke off at chapter fifteen, with Pinocchio hanged from an oak and left to die. That was the ending. He took it up again, finished in January 1883, and the book of thirty-six chapters came out in Florence that February. He did not live to see it become one of the most translated books in the world.