#perri klass

[quotesfrommyreading]

Hooper sums up the book’s moral this way: “Get educated, get informed, don’t let other people pull your strings.”

  —  The Real Story of Pinocchio Tells No Lies

[quotesfrommyreading]

Collodi didn’t always intend to be merciful to his protagonist. When Truglio’s students at Penn State reach the scene where Pinocchio is hanging from an oak tree, killed by two Assassins, she tells them, “That’s the end, that’s where he intended to finish it, but the journal editors and the readers wanted it to continue.” Her students are invariably surprised.

 —  The Real Story of Pinocchio Tells No Lies

[quotesfrommyreading]

We traced the path of Carlo’s daily walk, setting out from the Villa Il Bel Riposo. Carlo would turn right and head down the hill toward the cigar shop. (According to the translators, Carlo bought his cigars at the same store as the Italian king.) Along the street, Carlo passed two different shops where artisans worked with wood, one a carpenter and the other more of a woodcarver. The two proprietors were good friends, but they were contentious fellows, and often got into fights.

On the first page of Pinocchio, the block of wood turns up in the workshop of an old carpenter known in older translations as Mr. Cherry, because of his red nose. Mr. Cherry discovers that the wood can speak when he tries to make it into a table leg, only to hear it protest against being struck or cut, and the shock turns the tip of his nose from red to blue. So in Chapter 2, he turns the wood over to his friend Geppetto, who wants to make himself a puppet, “but a wonderful puppet, one that can dance, and fence, and do flips.” With this wonderful puppet, Geppetto hopes, he will be able to earn “a crust of bread and a glass of wine.” The mischievous block of wood manages to provoke a violent fight between the two men, who are both irascible and probably based on the craftsmen whose workshops Collodi passed on the Castello street.

Certainly, the people of modern-day Castello believe that their ancestors appeared in Pinocchio, Kraczyna said, as we followed the slope of Via della Petraia, with small houses and shops on either side. We turned right at the corner, which put us on the street where two “shady characters” had lived, presumed to be the models for the story’s Fox and Cat, Hooper says. This was also the main road to Sesto, where the porcelain factory was located, and a carriage brought locals there. Kraczyna told me that Carlo’s friend Giovanni Fattori, a Florentine artist, once painted the carriage driver in a way that brings to mind the coachman who takes Pinocchio on his ill-fated trip to Playland: “a little man wider than tall, soft and unctuous like a ball of butter, with a small face like a pink apple, a small mouth that was always laughing.”

  —  The Real Story of Pinocchio Tells No Lies

[quotesfrommyreading]

After that incident, Pinocchio becomes an excellent student. But he has to face one last temptation: the ill-fated trip to Playland. He’s able to redeem himself by rescuing Geppetto from the belly of a great shark. Hooper and Kraczyna point out that Collodi’s own father had to be rescued from debt, and the word for predatory lenders—loan sharks—also exists in Florentine dialect: pescecani.

  —  The Real Story of Pinocchio Tells No Lies

[quotesfrommyreading]

The fever that turns Pinocchio into a donkey is his punishment for skipping school and running off to Playland. He’d been warned by a talking cricket: “You poor little sucker! Don’t you know you’re bound to grow up to be an absolute donkey and that everyone will make a fool of you?” Kraczyna and Hooper explain that “donkey” had a double meaning in Collodi’s Italian. People who had to work hard were called donkeys; so were children who refused to apply themselves in school. “Collodi’s message to children, at a time when the life of an unskilled laborer was one of unremitting hardship,” they write, “was that if they insisted on being ‘donkeys’ at school, they risked living the life, and maybe dying the death, of a donkey.”

Education was a cause dear to Collodi’s heart. In 1861, numerous republics, kingdoms, city-states and duchies—each one with its own dialect and traditions—unified into a single nation that would cover the boot-shaped peninsula of Italy. It was in the classroom that the children of all those different provinces and states would learn to be Italians. When the country first unified, only 25 percent of Italians could read and write. By 1880, free compulsory schooling had raised the literacy rate to nearly 40 percent.

But Collodi was profoundly aware that children could not be expected to learn if they were hungry. In an open letter called “Bread and Books,” he argued that all humans needed to eat and drink, to be protected from the elements, to have a place to sleep. It was a harsh, eat-or-be-eaten world, and the only way out was through education.

  —  The Real Story of Pinocchio Tells No Lies

[quotesfrommyreading]

Along with educating the first generation of true Italians, Carlo Collodi wanted to send political messages to their parents. At one point, after Pinocchio is tricked out of his four gold coins by the Fox and the Cat, he takes his complaint to the courtroom. The author tells us that the judge, an ape, is “respected because of his honorable age, his white beard, and particularly his gold-rimmed glasses, which had no lenses.” The glasses are ostensibly because of an eye inflammation, but Hooper and Kraczyna suggest that is a pretext, and that the glasses are an empty show of wealth, serving no practical purpose. The whole episode warns readers not to expect much of the justice system. Instead of having his grievance addressed, Pinocchio is thrown into jail because he has been the victim of a crime. Then, when a general amnesty is issued throughout the prison, he is told he is not eligible because he is not himself a criminal. He is released only when he convinces his jailers, “I’m a crook too.”

Throughout the book, Collodi satirizes corruption in business and government, and points to the absurdity of social class. When the scary puppeteer prepares to throw Pinocchio’s friend Harlequin into the flames, the puppet pleads:

“Have pity, Mr. Fire-Eater!” “There are no misters here,” replied the puppeteer sternly. “Have pity, Mr. Knight!” “There are no knights here!” “Have pity, Mr. Lord!” “There are no lords here!”

At last, Pinocchio says, “Have pity, Your Excellency!” Those are the obsequious words the puppeteer has been waiting to hear.

 —  The Real Story of Pinocchio Tells No Lies

[quotesfrommyreading]

In Chapters 16 and 17, Pinocchio is saved by the Blue-Haired Fairy, who initially appears as the Little Girl with Blue Hair and is described as the ghost of a dead girl. There is evidence that the model for the Blue-Haired Fairy was Giovanna Ragionieri, the daughter of the gardener at Villa Il Bel Riposo. Kraczyna and Hooper speculate that Collodi’s description of the dead little girl may have echoes of the death of one of his sisters who died when he was about 12. In the course of the book, the Little Girl grows into a woman, as his sister never did.

 —  The Real Story of Pinocchio Tells No Lies

[quotesfrommyreading]

In the Disney film, Geppetto is a maker of toys and cuckoo clocks living in a vaguely European half-timber house. But there’s nothing quaint about the 19th-century Italian poverty in the book, in which Geppetto is a struggling woodcarver. Pinocchio spends much of the story filled with anxiety about finding something to eat. On his very first day, after he has gotten Geppetto arrested, he experiences “a hunger so real it could be cut with a knife.” When Geppetto returns home, he offers the hungry puppet the three pears he had intended for his own breakfast. Pinocchio promptly demands that they be peeled, but he ends up ravenously devouring the peels and cores, learning the lesson “We mustn’t be too finicky or dainty in our eating.”

There is also a certain risk of being eaten in a world where everyone is always hungry. Pinocchio narrowly escapes being thrown into the fire by a hungry puppeteer called Fire-Eater who needs wood to roast a ram for his dinner. Later, Pinocchio is coated in flour and almost fried in a pan along with an assortment of fish; the fisherman is looking forward to trying this new “puppet-fish.” In another episode, he is turned into a donkey and thrown into the sea to drown so that his owner can make a drum out of his hide; but helpful fishes eat off “that layer of donkey,” freeing the puppet again. And finally, he is actually eaten by a great shark and rescues Geppetto, who had been swallowed by the shark earlier in the story.

 —  The Real Story of Pinocchio Tells No Lies