Geppetto, a poor woodcarver in nineteenth-century Tuscany, is given a piece of wood that talks back. He carves it into a puppet and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs away the moment he can stand. From the first chapter, Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel is stranger than most readers remember.
Across twenty-five short chapters, Pinocchio sells his school book to see a puppet show, falls in with a fox and a cat who steal his gold coins, lies until his nose grows long, befriends a fairy who appears first as a corpse with blue hair, gets turned into a donkey, sold to a circus, drowned, swallowed by a whale, and finally — through a small act of kindness — becomes a real boy.
It was originally a serial in the Roman children's newspaper Giornale per i bambini. Collodi tried to kill Pinocchio off in chapter fifteen by hanging him from an oak tree. Italian readers wrote in begging him to continue. He did, but reluctantly. The book that resulted is funnier and crueler than the Disney version, and the Italian Collodi wrote it in is some of the most readable nineteenth-century prose in the language.
Companion essay Pinocchio is weirder than you remember — 7 min read
Collodi's Italian is one of the rare cases of nineteenth-century prose that adapts cleanly to A1. Sentences run six to nine words. The vocabulary is concrete — bread, wood, school, fox, cat, fairy, donkey, whale — words you can picture, which is exactly what makes A1 reading work. Most of the verbs are present tense and *passato prossimo*, the easy past. If you've finished a beginner textbook, you can read Pinocchio.
Beginner. You can read short sentences in present tense, recognise the most common 500 words, and follow a simple plot. Past tense is just out of reach.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. Pinocchio was originally written in Italian, but you choose your reading language when you start.
A1. Beginner. You can read short sentences in present tense, recognise the most common 500 words, and follow a simple plot. Past tense is just out of reach.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
Yes — this is one of our books for early-stage learners. Sentences run short and the vocabulary stays inside the most common five hundred to one thousand words of italian.
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