In 1881, a Florentine journalist with money troubles and a weakness for gambling started publishing a children's serial in a newspaper to pay his bills. Carlo Lorenzini signed it with a pen name borrowed from his mother's village, Collodi. He had no idea he was inventing one of the most reproduced characters in the history of storytelling: a wooden puppet whose nose grows when he lies, who dies and comes back, who wants, more than anything, to become a real boy.
Two hundred years after Lorenzini's birth, that puppet has a passport nobody can revoke. From 8 to 10 September, New York is holding three days of screenings, panels and readings under the title 'The Carlo Collodi Legacy,' the second chapter of a project called Spotlight: Italy on Screen Today, conceived by Loredana Commonara. 'Pinocchio was born in Italy, but by now he belongs to the world,' she says. 'Every generation rediscovers him, and every artist gives him back a new voice.'
The programme itself is a small map of how far the puppet has travelled from that first newspaper serial. It opens at Sullaluna NYC, an independent bookshop in Brooklyn, with two illustrated retellings, Roberto Catani's 'Il Burattino e la Balena' and Beatrice Pucci's 'Pinocchio,' introduced by the historian Vanessa Roghi. The next day, at NYU's Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, scholars including Larry Wolff, Perri Klass and David Forgacs sit down for a panel bluntly titled 'The Many Lives of Pinocchio,' built around a simple question: why does a nineteenth-century Tuscan morality tale about a lying puppet keep getting reborn in every medium, in every language, for every new generation of children who have never heard of Collodi?
The closing night answers with a direct comparison. At the Quad Cinema in Manhattan, Matteo Garrone's 2019 film, with Roberto Benigni as Geppetto, will screen alongside Luigi Comencini's 1972 television version, the one that shaped the imagination of an entire generation of Italians, with Andrea Balestri as Pinocchio, Nino Manfredi as Geppetto, Gina Lollobrigida as the Blue Fairy, the comic duo Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia as the Cat and the Fox, Vittorio De Sica as the judge, and Lionel Sander as Mangiafuoco. Garrone will introduce his film in a video message; Francesca Comencini will speak about her father's work in another. Two generations of Italian cinema, meeting through the same wooden puppet.
What makes the story worth telling isn't the anniversary itself, but what the anniversary exposes: a character invented to pay off a debt has outlived every empire, war and fashion that has passed through Italy since 1881, and is now being claimed, staged and argued over by American universities and Brooklyn bookshops as much as by Tuscany. Collodi never got to see it. He died in 1890, comfortably obscure, certain he had written a minor serial for children.
The project, supported by Italy's Directorate General for Cinema and Audiovisual, the Italian Consulate General in New York, NYU's Casa Italiana and the Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi, began in 2025 alongside New York initiatives tied to Italian cinema's Oscar campaign, according to ANSA. But the real story sitting underneath the schedule is older and stranger than any awards push: a puppet who wanted to be human is still, two centuries on, the closest thing culture has to proof that some stories refuse to stay put in the country that invented them.
