Collodi: His Works and His Italy
 | | from Carlo Collodi, lo spazio delle meraviglie | | Carlo Lorenzini or "Collodi" |
Few intimate details are known about the life of Pinocchio's creator, the lifelong bachelor Carlo Lorenzini, who was born in Florence on November 24, 1826, and who chose to take the pen name Collodi, the name of his mother's native town near Pescia in Tuscany. Collodi came of age as a writer in the "decennio di preparazione," the decade from 1850 to 1860, when Italy was moving toward unification. We do know that he, like many of his generation, was a participant in the1848-49 battles for Italian national independence and unity and that throughout the 1850s he was very active as a journalist, writing under a variety of names and on many topics, including politics and music. | | Rebecca West |  In this slideshow, review the history of Collodi's publications that led up his most famous work, Pinocchio. |
Collodi lived in a complex period of Italian history when there was a great push toward national unity but much ambivalence about what such unity would mean to a country deeply tied to local traditions, dialects and customs. The writer lived the new reality of a unified nation--a unification that he, a Republican against the Monarchists, had ostensibly supported--with true ambivalence. His beloved hometown, Florence, was the first capital of the newly formed nation for five years, for example, and Collodi disliked intensely the effect it had on a place that for him had previously been like "a great big house in which all the inhabitants knew one another." He was attracted by order, discipline and structured educational practices, but he was also fascinated by the occult, mesmerism and the inherent disorder of things. initiated after unification with the goal of "making the Italian people Italian," but in spite of his interest in pedagogical writing, Collodi was highly suspicious of them because he saw them as a threat to individuality and personal freedom. These clashes within Collodi find expression in his tale of Pinocchio, which it is possible to read as a tale of both transgression and the necessity for conformity. |
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