This year Pinocchio will be 158 years old. Did you know that The Adventures of Pinocchio. Story of a puppet of Collodi is one of the most translated books in the world? It has translations in 260 different languages. The first version of The Adventures of Pinocchio appeared as a serial novel in the weekly newspaper 'Il Giornale dei Bambini' and ended with the episode of the assassination of Pinocchio, then the readers, protesting, induced Collodi to continue the story and for this I thank the readers of that time!
From some details in the text it can be deduced that Pinocchio is set in the past compared to the era in which it was written, it is made reference, for example, to the gold sequins, current currency at the time of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
But I believe that Pinocchio does not have such a specific temporal setting and that, like all fairy tales, it is set in an imaginary time and space that mix with elements of reality from the past and the contemporaneity of the time.
Collodi to describe the dress of Pinocchio says only these few words: a little dress made of flowered paper, a pair of shoes of tree bark and a little cap made with the crumb of bread. A few words, however, that spark the imagination of many illustrators and artists. The first one to draw Pinocchio in the 1883 edition was Enrico Mazzanti who gave it back with the costume we know well: the pointed hat, the gorget, the flared blouse and the short pants (now known as pinocchietti in Italy) typical of the children of the time. Later Carlo Chiostri will reinforce this image with his illustrations. Later again Attilio Mussino in 1911 and Beppe Porcheddu of 1942 represent Pinocchio with a collar that seems to be a relative of the one in the marine style, the sailor collar, that was popularized in 1840 by the Queen Victoria for the young princes and then began to spread in the clothing of boys and girls from all over Europe.
Being not easy to establish the temporal setting of The Adventures of Pinocchio it is not even easy to establish how the children of the time were dressed and consequently Pinocchio. It seems that, in The Adventures of Pinocchio, school is very important, there are many references to the importance of study. Even Geppetto, poor in the barrel, worries about sending Pinocchio to school. This seems to me to refer Pinocchio at the end of the 1800s, in fact, despite the fact that the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was in the vanguard of schooling, especially in Florence, the laws on compulsory behavior came after the unification of Italy.
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