Carlo Collodi is the pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini, (1826-1890), a journalist and writer born in Florence. Educated in religious schools, at the age of twenty he started his career by writing reviews for the catalogue of an important Florentine bookshop, and immediately after for the specialist journal “L'Italia Musicale”. He rapidly became famous as a journalist, and wrote for periodicals all over Italy, even founding some himself, such as “Il Lampione”, censored and closed down in 1848 and obstinately started up again 11 years later on the occasion of the referendum on the annexation of Piedmont. He served as a volunteer in the Wars of Independence of 1848 and 1860, and from the 50s worked as a writer and playwright. From 1856 he also began using the pseudonym Carlo Collodi, with which he signed the works of the 70s and 80s. As a child Carlo had spent periods in Collodi, the village between Lucca and Pistoia where his mother Angela Orzali had been born and lived as a girl. His first children’s book I racconti delle fate, splendid translations of Perrault’s French fairy tales, was published in 1876. Subsequently a series of school textbooks made him a pillar of the educational establishment in the newly-united Italy: Giannettino, Minuzzolo and other tales in which he combined fantasy and fact. In 1881, in the first number of the “Giornale per i bambini” (a pioneer in the field of children’s magazines in Italy) the first instalment of The Adventures of Pinocchio was published under the title Story of a Puppet. Collodi also published other stories in the magazine (later collected in Storie allegre, 1887), including Pipì, o lo scimmiottino color di rosa, a sort of self-deprecating sequel to Pinocchio. Lorenzini died suddenly in 1890 in Florence, where he was buried in the Monumental cemetery of San Miniato al Monte. His manuscripts, donated by his family, are kept in the National Central Library in Florence.