«”What shall I call him?” he said to himself.
“I think I’ll call him PINOCCHIO.
This name will make his fortune»



Everyone knows the story of the most famous wooden puppet, but not everyone knows that the author of the book, Carlo Collodi (a.k.a Carlo Lorenzini) was born in Florence and that he set the entire plot of the book in our beautiful Tuscany.


Some sources place the story of Pinocchio in the northern area of Florence and the reason for this hypothesis deals with the “Villa Il Bel Riposo”, a magnificent house where Collodi stayed, guest of his brother, during the second half of the nineteen century. This is the place where he wrote the book “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, and the surrounding landscapes surely inspired the locations of the story and some of the characters were based on real people he got to know during his stay.


One of the most tender stories is the one of Giovannina (the daughter of the gardener of Villa il Bel Riposo) who spent so much time with the writer because she loved listening to the incredible stories that he invented. And guess what? One of these
stories concerned a special child, made of wood. Giovannina was blond and she had got blue eyes…it goes without saying that she became the famous Blue Fairy.
Moreover, the part of the tale in which Pinocchio is hanged to the Giant Oak Tree is set in the province of Lucca. The famous tree still exists, it can be visited, and it is described as “the oak of the witches”.