Carlo Collodi

Italian · 1826 to 1890

Born Carlo Lorenzini on November 24, 1826, in Florence, he was the eldest of ten children of a cook and a serving woman who both worked for the wealthy Garzoni family. He took his pen name from Collodi, the small Tuscan village near Pescia where his mother had been born and where he spent stretches of his childhood. Educated for a time in a seminary at Colle di Val d'Elsa, he abandoned the priesthood and went to work in a Florentine bookshop, then turned to journalism. He fought as a volunteer in the Tuscan army during the wars of Italian unification in 1848 and again in 1859, and founded the satirical newspaper Il Lampione, which the Grand Duke's censors suppressed. He wrote theater criticism, political satire, and a popular series of children's textbooks that began with Giannettino. In 1881 the Giornale per i bambini, a new Roman children's weekly, began serializing his story of a mischievous wooden puppet under the title Storia di un burattino. He reportedly tired of it and ended the first installment with the marionette hanged from an oak; readers protested, and he resumed. The collected book appeared in 1883 as The Adventures of Pinocchio, the tale of a puppet whose nose grows when he lies and who longs to become a real boy. Collodi also translated French fairy tales, including those of Charles Perrault, into Italian. He died suddenly in Florence on October 26, 1890, at the age of sixty-three, before he could know that his puppet would become one of the most widely translated characters in the world.