Places in the new Park

The Collodi Foundation has a stretch of hillside available for its planned extension, situated directly opposite the Castle of Collodi and measuring roughly 8 hectares.

The new Park is structured into three parts_:

- the lower part, characterized by dense vegetation, which can be accessed across a bridge from the old park_:

- a very steep and narrow intermediate area_;

- an area situated higher up, quite wide and much less steep, which is to constitute the arrival point and also a "landmark" on the landscape.

The backbone of this structure is constituted by a special track that affords a rapid connection between the access route and the top of the hill, and also by lightly sloping transverse routes and small "stopping stations" or small buildings scattered along the paths. All along the way, there are events happening, of a mechanical or computerized nature, and objectual presences appear (art works or objects of other types), while at the stopping stations or in the small buildings one finds a thematic accentuation of a typology of events or situations (immoderation and paradox in Alice's Den, the hive of buzzing activity in Mastro Ciliegia's Workshop, a sense of solitude in the Desert of the Little Prince, etc.).

The overall conceptual theme of the Park draws its inspiration from two salient elements_: the place (the climb up to the village of Collodi, the elements in the natural landscape, water...), and the character (Pinocchio, the episodes from the story, the whale, his European friends).

The underlying idea is to construct a backbone running all the way up the area of hillside destined to become the Park of Pinocchio's European Friends, in such a way that this central spinal element will function as a mirror image of the network of houses and streets of the village of Collodi (the place)_; metaphorically, this backbone reflects the progression of Pinocchio (the character). Situated within the bosom of the mountain (a light indentation, not a gouged-out wound), hollowed out from its depths, it leads the visitor from the darkness of its entry to the light of the worlds inhabited by the various different characters.

The darkness of the mountain's cave-like belly acts at one and the same time as a link and a separation between the different settings_: the real world and the world of fantasy are dynamically intertwined, overhung by the mountain that gathers them into itself.

This central backbone is the element around which all the ascents in the park are organized. Since it is necessary to guarantee access to the park, the backbone is composed primarily of a rack-and pinion railway that appears and disappears inside the mountain, but is never entirely visible because it is hidden by vegetation and by two walls between which the track is laid.

Alongside this mechanically assisted climb there run two footpaths and several buttressed terraces, which exploit the natural slope of the hillside to facilitate the climb up to the top.

The starting point, the whale's mouth, leads to a pathway that runs partly underground, and partly into and through the wood, symbolizing the difficulty of escaping from shadowy situations. This covered walkway then leads back into the light close to one of the intermediate stopping stations, the village. During this first stretch of the route, it is the natural element that predominates_: both the path that runs alongside the rail tracks and the path with the least gradient (< 5%, accessible to the disabled) gradually lose their artificiality as they wend their way through the wood, becoming integrated with nature.

At the top of the village the path divides into two_: one can either begin the climb to the top of the hill or continue to the second area of the Park. Thus the rack and pinion railway and the footpath running parallel to it begin to become intermingled, enhancing the reference to the complexity of the ascent up to the Castle of Collodi.

Here ends the reference to the village, and the rack-and-pinion railway returns into the bosom of the mountain to climb up a veritable ramp that reaches right to the top, where the arrival point acts both as a focal junction in the higher section of the Park and also as a reference point visible from the valley far below. From here one can enjoy a fine view of the winding paths and the existing Park of Pinocchio, the crucial points bonding together the new Park and the village of Collodi.

Pinocchio's Park, thus metamorphosed into the guise of a "museum", effectively comes to represent the nodal element coupling two different realms_: the world of the village of Collodi and the world of imagination.