\u201cOnce upon a time there was\u2026 \u2018A king!\u2019 my little readers will immediately say. No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.\u201d 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\u2019s past? And had the Talking Cricket, when he was not dispensing his wise advice, ever fallen in love?\nThis 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\u2019s novel, at the dawn of Pinocchio\u2019s 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.\nEdited by Antonio Manzini\u2014who contributes the gripping story of the Cat and the Fox, caught up in a bizarre mystery involving chickens, hens and other animals\u2014the 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s pyrotechnic prose. Beatrice Masini reconstructs the desperate search for self and identity of one of the most terrifying characters in Collodi\u2019s 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.\nPublished to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Carlo Collodi\u2019s birth, When Pinocchio Wasn\u2019t 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 \u201cliterature,\u201d as Manzini observes in his opening note, \u201cis not a statue to be worshipped, but a conversation that never ends.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00abC\u2019era una volta\u2026 \u201cUn re!\u201d diranno subito i miei piccoli lettori. No, ragazzi, avete sbagliato. C\u2019era una volta un pezzo di legno\u00bb. \u00c8 questo forse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1745,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-libri"],"meta_box":{"seleziona_logo":"Standard","colore":"Prefedinito","autore":"AA. VV.","citazione":"","titolo_2":"","releasedate":"","publisher":"","pages":"","translation_rights_sold_to":"","group_info_progetto":[],"immagini":[],"galleria_video":[],"autori-libri_to":["527","533"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1746,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1744\/revisions\/1746"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}