One of the greatest productions in the history of Italian television, serialised in five episodes and then cut down into a version for the cinema. This libertarian adaptation of Collodi’s classic, developed together with Suso Cecchi d’Amico, is like a screenwriter’s manual: Pinocchio is a child from the very start and periodically returns to being a puppet, as if these two states continued to coexist, while the Blue Fairy is really the dead wife of Geppetto, who becomes a more maternal parent. It is as if he had learned a lesson from Finestra sul Luna Park: the series is also a paternal melodrama, as well as one of the most beautiful depictions of children in the history of cinema. However, the film is also profoundly faithful to Collodi in that it is a “fable about hunger” set in a small-minded, yet comic world of peasants, in which magic is an almost natural addition to everyday life and everyone dreams of America. The fantastic springs from a minute realism, from a hypnotic work on real locations (Piero Gherardi’s sets are astounding). Looking back, it offers the first in a series of elegies to the peasant world which Rai would produce over the following years (Padre padrone, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Christ Stopped at Eboli). Animals are sometimes people, as in the case of the Snail, or the Cat and the Fox (one is tempted to say that it is as if they arethe visualisation of country nicknames) and the puppet theatre which appears in the first scene sets the tone for everything that follows. Nino Manfredi places his repertory of pathetic movements at the service of the film and gives one of his best performances, while Fiorenzo Carpi provides an unforgettable score. The actor playing Lampwick, Domenico Santoro, was one of the interviewees in I bambini e noi. The film’s set was recently recreated in several beautiful scenes in Francesca Comencini’s Il tempo che ci vuole.