Quando Pinocchio non c’era
“Once upon a time there was… ‘A king!’ my little readers will immediately say. No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.” This is perhaps the most famous opening in Italian literature. But before a puppet ever made his voice heard by an astonished carpenter, who had that carpenter been, and what had the Cat and the Fox been up to? What secrets lay hidden in Fire-Eater’s past? And had the Talking Cricket, when he was not dispensing his wise advice, ever fallen in love? This collection explores the lives of the characters from The Adventures of Pinocchio before a piece of wood arrives to turn their world upside down. These stories stop on the very threshold of Collodi’s novel, at the dawn of Pinocchio’s entrance onto the scene, and, by delving into the inner lives and unspoken histories of eight characters, they encompass a broad spectrum of human experience: desire and maternal love, the search for identity and friendship, loneliness, anger and wonder. Edited by Antonio Manzini—who contributes the gripping story of the Cat and the Fox, caught up in a bizarre mystery involving chickens, hens and other animals—the anthology brings together eight major voices in contemporary Italian literature. Valeria Parrella portrays the most tender day in the life of the Talking Cricket, even as he is busy making fun of the absurd demands of human beings. Fabio Stassi gives us a moving portrait of Geppetto, involved in Garibaldi’s campaigns and regarded with suspicion by the people of his village. Gessica Franco Carlevero retraces the long and yearning journey of Master Cherry, the first to notice something strange about that extraordinary piece of wood. Through Maurizio Maggiani’s pen, Candlewick reveals the heartbreaking love of his mother, while the story of Fire-Eater and his past as a charcoal burner is entrusted to Remo Rapino’s pyrotechnic prose. Beatrice Masini reconstructs the desperate search for self and identity of one of the most terrifying characters in Collodi’s tale, the fearsome Shark; finally, Melania G. Mazzucco imagines a Gothic tale for the touching story of the Fairy with Turquoise Hair, transforming it into a dark digression, a ghost story. Published to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Carlo Collodi’s birth, When Pinocchio Wasn’t There is a tribute to one of the foundational works of Italian literature. It is a book to which, at different moments in their lives, readers return with curiosity or nostalgia, discovering something new each time. And in doing so, proving that “literature,” as Manzini observes in his opening note, “is not a statue to be worshipped, but a conversation that never ends.”