Collodi: The Park of Pinocchio

The park of Pinocchio had no alternative but to be built in Collodi, where the old village has remained as it was a century ago with its characteristic group of houses covering the hill from the top right down to Villa Garzoni at the bottom and its spectacular eighteenth century garden, where the mother of the writer, Carlo Lorenzini, was born. He was the author of „The Adventures of Pinocchio“, one of the biggest selling books in the world after the Bible and the Koran, and spent his childhood in Collodi with his grandparents; this is why the brilliant journalist
and writer adopted the pen name of Collodi, and this is where the imagery in „The Adventures of Pinocchio“ originated and became so powerful as to make it a masterpiece without limits in space or time.

The character of Collodi still combines the fantastic with reality and makes the story come true in our imagination. Built over a thirty year period, between 1956 and 1987, it‘s not your common-or-garden amusement park, but a fantastic, highly suggestive place, a precious example of collective creation by artists with strong personalities, where you can feel you are immersed in a living fable, in a spontaneous and natural adventure, in the midst of the peaceful beauty of art and nature. The plan to build a park to commemorate the famous marionette at Collodi dates back to 1951 when the then mayor of Pescia, professor Rolando Anzillotti, set up a committee for the monument to Pinocchio in his homeland. A national competition for building the monument was held and attracted designs from as many as 84 sculptors: joint winners were Emilio Greco for „Pinocchio and the Fairy“, and Venturino Venturi for the „Square of Mosaics“. In 1956, the famous five metre high bronze group, that symbolically depicts
the transformation of Pinocchio from a marionette to a boy was inaugurated, while the highly original mosaics in the Square narrate the main episodes of the Adventures of Pinocchio. The park was enlarged over the years, and the work of the architects, Renato Baldi and Lionello de Luigi, was integrated in 1963 with the „Inn of the Red Lobster“ and an adjoining restaurant by the architect, Giovanni Michelucci, the red arches of which bring to mind the claws of a lobster.

In 1972, to the South of the park, the „Land of Toys“ was built, a fabulous journey around over one hectare of Mediterranean countryside, designed by Pietro Porcinai, and studded with twenty-one bronze sculptures by Pietro Consagra and the buildings of the architect, Marco Zanuso. A small tunnel leads to „Pinocchio‘s village“, comprising a stone path populated by characters of the novel: the military policeman with his moustache who bars the path and forces the children to pass between his legs, the Talking Cricket, the Great Marionette Theatre, the Cat and the Fox, the Assassins‘ Wood, the Child Fairy with her White Cottage and the Housekeeper Snail,and the room where Pinocchio was examined by the three doctors. In the nearby Field of Wonders, there‘s the Tree of Gold Coins, of course, and not far off you can see the Serpent and the Four Rabbits carrying the coffin to convince Pinocchio to take his medicine. Then the Fairy appears with her arms wide open, the Crab spraying water, the Nets and Pan of the Green Fisherman, and Pinocchio transformed into a donkey in Toyland, forced to work in a circus.... and more and more, until the whole area and all the characters in the book appear.


(Portions of this article first appeared in "Toscana & Chianti News")
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