Carlo Collodi Collection

Carlo Lorenzini was born in Florence, Italy in 1826, but spent most of his childhood in the town of Collodi - the name of which he would later borrow for his famous pseudonym, Carlo Collodi. A volunteer with the Tuscan army during the Italian Wars of Independence, Collodi was politically active and, from the 1850s onwards, regularly contributed satirical articles to political newspapers. He first began to engage with a young audience of readers when he published a translation of the French Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault in 1876, and then began work on his most celebrated book, The Adventures of Pinocchio, which was published as a complete book in 1883. He died in 1890, in his home city of Florence.