Carlo Lorenzini was born in Florence, the eldest of ten children, of whom only a few survived childhood. His father was a cook and his mother a seamstress, both working for a wealthy noble family, the Marchesi Ginori. He spent part of his childhood with relatives in his mother’s home village of Collodi, in the hills of Tuscany, and years later he took the village’s name as his pen name.

As a young man he studied for the priesthood at a seminary, gave it up, and became a journalist. He fought as a volunteer in Italy’s wars of independence, in 1848 and again in 1859, and he founded a satirical newspaper. For years he wrote reviews, sketches and comic pieces for the Florentine papers.

He came to children’s books almost by chance, when a publisher asked him to translate the French fairy tales of Charles Perrault into Italian. That led to a series of school readers about a lively boy called Giannettino. Then, in July 1881, a new children’s magazine in Rome began printing Collodi’s Story of a Puppet, in installments.

In it, a poor old woodcarver named Geppetto carves a puppet out of a piece of talking wood. The puppet, Pinocchio, runs away the moment his legs are finished, and is greedy, lazy, kind-hearted and incapable of learning from his mistakes. He kills the Talking Cricket who tries to give him advice, sells his schoolbook to see a puppet show, is tricked by a fox and a cat, and is turned into a donkey. Every time he tells a lie, his nose grows. The original is a good deal darker than the cartoon. Collodi first ended the serial with Pinocchio hanged from an oak tree by two assassins. Young readers protested, and the editor persuaded him to bring the puppet back.

The complete Adventures of Pinocchio came out as a book in 1883, with illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti. In the end Pinocchio rescues Geppetto from the belly of a giant dogfish and, by working hard and caring for his father, becomes a real boy.

Collodi died suddenly in Florence in 1890, without any idea of how far his puppet would travel. Pinocchio has since been translated into hundreds of languages, more than almost any other book.