The Adventures of Pinocchio

The Adventures of Pinocchio is a children's novel by the Italian writer Carlo Collodi, the pen name of Carlo Lorenzini, serialized from 1881 and published in complete book form in 1883. It tells of Geppetto, a poor woodcarver who carves a puppet from an enchanted piece of wood and names him Pinocchio, who comes magically to life but proves mischievous, disobedient and prone to lying, a habit that famously makes his wooden nose grow longer each time he tells a falsehood. Guided, and repeatedly ignored, by the moralizing voice of the Talking Cricket and by a beautiful fairy with turquoise hair who intervenes at several crises, Pinocchio runs through a chain of misadventures, tricked by the con-artist Fox and Cat into burying his coins in a field of miracles, sold into a puppet theater, transformed along with other truant boys into a donkey after succumbing to the pleasures of the lawless Land of Toys, and finally swallowed by an enormous dogfish, inside whose belly he is reunited with Geppetto, who had gone searching for him at sea and been swallowed himself. After escaping the dogfish and finally choosing, through genuine unselfish courage and hard work, to care for the aging Geppetto rather than pursue his own pleasure, Pinocchio is rewarded by the fairy by being transformed at last from a wooden puppet into a real flesh-and-blood boy. One of the most translated works of Italian literature, and considerably darker and more moralistic in its original serialized form than the many later adaptations that softened it, the novel has become a foundational text of modern children's literature and a widely recognized cultural touchstone for the consequences of lying and the value of selfless love.