ABSTRACT
Perhaps no text fits Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic better than Pinocchio: a book which renews itself at every reading, while remaining unforgettable, indelibly embedded (and unconsciously active) in the most secret folds of our memory. 1 Yet, reading Carlo Lorenzini’s coming-of-age tale as a classic literary work (as Calvino and others have suggested) inevitably opens the door to a number of unsettled questions about the genre to which it is assigned and the methodology we might apply to its analysis. Is it a modern folktale for (eternal) children, to be analysed with sophisticated semiotic or anthropological tools aimed at explaining its profound wisdom and universal appeal? Or is it a pedagogical-psychoanalytical ‘romance’ about childhood and its discontents, revealing more about the adult mind and culture of the newly united Italy in which it was written than about the children it was written for?
