Pinocchio

6-8 min read
16 pages

Pinocchio, the tale by Carlo Collodi to read aloud. A puppet who runs off on the first day, and a nose that gives him away every time.

A carpenter called Geppetto had a piece of pine and no money, so he made a puppet out of it, and named him Pinocchio, and had not finished carving the feet before the puppet used them to run out of the door.

Geppetto caught him in the street and brought him back, and sold his own coat to buy a spelling book, and sent him to school in the morning.

Pinocchio went as far as the corner, where there was a puppet theatre, and he sold the spelling book for a ticket.

The theatre owner nearly put him on the fire and then gave him five gold pieces instead, because Pinocchio talked about his father and the coat, and the owner turned out not to be as fierce as his voice.

On the way home a fox and a cat fell into step beside him. «Five gold pieces,» said the fox. «Plant them in the Field of Miracles and by morning you'll have two thousand.»

He planted them. He watered them. He came back the next day to a hole in the ground and no fox, no cat, and no gold, and he had to walk home hungry with nothing to show his father.

And every time he was asked what had happened, and told it a little better than it had been, his nose grew — a finger's width for each thing that was not true, until he could not get it through the door.

He ran away again, to an island where there was no school and no work and nothing but games, along with a great many other boys who had all had the same idea.

It lasted five months. Then one morning Pinocchio woke up with long ears, and by evening they were a donkey's ears, and in a week he was a donkey entirely, with a bell on his neck and a man leading him to market.

He was sold to a circus, and then, after a fall, sold again to a man who wanted his skin for a drum, and thrown into the sea to drown.

In the water the fish ate the donkey off him, and what was left was a wooden puppet again, swimming. And then the sea went dark above him, and he was inside a dogfish the size of a barn.

Deep inside it, sitting at a table with a candle, was Geppetto, who had gone out in a boat to look for him months before and had been there ever since.

They got out through the mouth while it slept, because a dogfish that big sleeps with its mouth open, and Pinocchio swam for the shore with his father on his back.

After that they lived in a hut, and Pinocchio got up early. He worked the pump for a neighbour to earn a glass of milk, he learned to weave baskets, and he sat up at night learning to read out of a book nobody had sold.

One morning he woke and his hands were not wooden. He got out of bed and looked in the glass and there was a boy in it — an ordinary boy, with untidy hair, standing in a room where a puppet used to sleep.

«Where has the old wooden Pinocchio got to?» he said. «Over there,» said Geppetto, and there he was, propped in the corner with his head on one side. «That,» said Geppetto, «is what boys look like before they decide to be any use.»

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Text source: Plot in the public domain (Carlo Collodi, 1883). The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Pinocchio characters

Pinocchio: A wooden puppet who runs away in the first chapter and keeps running. In Collodi's original he is far less likeable than the film suggests.
Geppetto: Carves him and sells his own coat to buy him a spelling book. Pinocchio sells the book for a puppet-show ticket.
The talking cricket: Gives good advice and is killed with a hammer in chapter four. He returns as a ghost, but he is not an adviser on anyone's shoulder.
The Fox and the Cat: One pretending to be lame, the other blind. They take his gold coins by telling him to plant them.
The fairy with turquoise hair: First appears as a girl who says she is dead. Only later is she a fairy, and only much later a mother.
The great fish: A shark in the Italian, not a whale — the whale belongs to later translations and to the film.

Want to know where these stories come from? The articles are here

Pinocchio

Pinocchio characters

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