Pinocchio is weirder than you remember — Storica
storica.club
The original 1881 serial ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree. Italian children wrote in begging the author to continue. He resumed reluctantly. What followed — donkey-skin drums, dead-girl fairies, a satire of every other moralising children's book in Italy — became one of the most translated books in human history, and quietly helped teach Italians their own language.
  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago

    This book also taught me Italian as L2. The relative teaching me didn’t have a lot of books around, but they had Pinocchio, and it was easy enough for a child (I was, like, eight years old).

    Incidentally, the relative in question spoke Venetian natively. (Or rather, a local Venetian dialect, from the mosaic known as “Talian”.) And regarding the European landscape, I hate how this came off at the expense of the local languages. If this process happened now, people would probably be a bit more informed about keeping the local languages thriving, side-by-side with Italian; but that was the XIX century though, sadly nationalism was the default mindset back then.