In the original 1881 version, the book ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree.

Carlo Collodi serialised the story in Il Giornale per i bambini, the first Italian children's magazine, beginning on July 7, 1881. The first installment was titled Storia di un burattino — Story of a Puppet. Eight episodes later, over four months, the Fox and the Cat lured Pinocchio into a forest at night, robbed him, and strung him from the branch of la Quercia grande, the Great Oak: gli legarono le mani dietro le spalle, e passatogli un nodo scorsoio intorno alla gola, lo attaccarono penzoloni al ramo di una quercia. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave one great convulsion, and stayed there as if frozen stiff. Fine.

Collodi was done. He had collected his fee. Italian children wrote in begging him to continue. He resumed reluctantly five months later, on February 16, 1882, with the title changed from Storia di un burattino to Le avventure di Pinocchio and a Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair, lying in a window of a forest cottage — appearing in chapter sixteen to revive him.

The next twenty-one chapters are not gentler.

The cricket, killed

A talking cricket appears in chapter four to lecture Pinocchio about respecting his father. Pinocchio picks up a hammer from the workbench and hurls it. The cricket rimase lì stecchito e appiccicato alla parete — stuck flat to the wall, dead. He returns later as a ghost, but Collodi narrates the death with the deadpan tone of a police report.

The feet, burned off

In chapter seven, exhausted and freezing, Pinocchio falls asleep with his wooden feet propped on a brazier. He wakes up with no feet. Geppetto carves him a new pair the following morning. There is no moral framing of the loss; it is treated as an inconvenience.

The fairy, originally a corpse

When she first appears in chapter fifteen she is con i capelli turchini, e il viso bianco come un'immagine di cera, gli occhi chiusi e le mani incrociate sul petto — turquoise hair, a face white as a wax effigy, eyes closed, hands crossed on the chest. She tells the panicking Pinocchio she is dead and the bier is being prepared. Only in later installments does she become a living girl, then a fairy, then something approaching a mother.

The donkey-skin drum

Pinocchio runs away to il Paese dei Balocchi, the Land of Toys, where boys play games all day and never go to school. After five months they all turn into actual donkeys, sold to circuses. Pinocchio-the-donkey performs at one until he breaks his leg in an accident. The owner sells the donkey to a man who wants to make a drum out of his hide. The man ties a heavy stone to the donkey's neck and throws him into the sea to drown. Inside the dead donkey, Pinocchio reverts to wood and is then swallowed by un Pesce-cane — a dogfish, a kind of shark, which Disney would later resize into a whale.

This is, again, a children's book.

Why it reads this way

Carlo Lorenzini — Collodi was a pen name, taken from his mother's home village in Tuscany — was a satirist before he was a children's author. He fought as a volunteer in the Tuscan army during the Italian Wars of Independence in 1848 and 1860. In 1853 he founded the satirical newspaper Il Lampione, which was censored and shut down by the Grand Duke of Tuscany. A year later he launched another, Lo Scaramuccia. His early books were a parodic travel guide and a play of political ideas. He came to children's literature in his fifties because the new Italian state was paying for school readers, and a magazine commission was steady money.

He wrote Pinocchio with the deadpan irony of a man who thought most children's literature was sentimental rubbish. The donkey-skin drum is meant to land as a joke at the expense of every previous moralising children's book in Italy. The cricket is a cartoon of every adult who ever lectured a working-class boy on respect. The Land of Toys is a satire of the truancy panic Italian schoolmasters used to drum up. None of the cruelty is gratuitous, exactly. It is dramatised exhaustion with the genre.

How a satire helped teach Italians Italian

The legacy of the book has almost nothing to do with the satire. It has to do with the language.

When Italy was politically unified in 1861, the linguist Tullio De Mauro's classic estimate is that only about 2.5% of the population spoke standard Italian — roughly 630,000 people out of twenty-five million. The rest spoke a mosaic of regional dialects mutually unintelligible enough that a Neapolitan recruit could not understand a Piedmontese officer. The new state needed a single shared language, and fast. They chose Tuscan, the literary tongue of Dante and Petrarch — but most Italians had never heard Tuscan spoken in daily life.

What got Tuscan into ordinary Italian homes was schoolbooks. Pinocchio became one of them. Collodi wrote in clean middle-register Florentine Tuscan: short sentences, common verbs, concrete nouns — pane, naso, bugia, legno, fata, volpe (bread, nose, lie, wood, fairy, fox). The book ended up on every elementary school syllabus and stayed there. Generations of Italian children learned to read in the language Collodi had already simplified for them. By 1951, when De Mauro re-counted, the proportion of Italians who could speak standard Italian had climbed from 2.5% to roughly 87%. Television finished that job. Mass schooling, with Pinocchio in it, started it.

Collodi himself never knew. He died of a stroke in October 1890, eight years after the book was completed in print, with no idea he had written one of the most translated books in human history. He had no children. The puppet he wrote reluctantly to make rent has now outlived him by a hundred and thirty-six years.

What it's like to read now

What's strange about reading the original today — not the Disney version, not even a translation, the original — is that it doesn't feel old. The Italian is plain enough that an early learner with a textbook behind them can finish a chapter in a sitting. The plot moves at television speed: thirty-six chapters of trouble before the redemption finally lands. The pictures are vivid, weird, and entirely Collodi's: a piece of wood that talks back, a fox pretending to be blind, a donkey at the bottom of the sea. You do not need a literary education to follow it. He wasn't writing for one.

Most translations soften the book. Most adaptations cut the donkey-skin drum. Most adults who think they know Pinocchio are remembering Disney. The book itself is still the book Collodi reluctantly extended past chapter fifteen because Italian children would not let it end.

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I'm one of the makers of Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. We adapt classics — including the unsanitised Pinocchio, donkey-skin drum and all — into A0–B2 readings of about fifteen minutes a day, in seven languages. The original Italian is on the shelf if you want it.