Parco di Pinocchio

In the Tuscan village that gave Carlo Lorenzini his pen name, a wooden puppet's story became a serious art project. Pinocchio Park opened in 1956 as a sequence of sculptures, buildings and planted rooms by leading twentieth-century artists, a green route in which the Adventures unfold stage by stage on a hillside above Pescia.

Why it matters

This is not a funfair with character costumes. The Parco di Pinocchio was conceived as a monumental route, an idea closer to a sculpture garden than to a theme park, and the names attached to it — Emilio Greco, Venturino Venturi, Pietro Consagra, Marco Zanuso, Giovanni Michelucci, Pietro Porcinai — belong to the canon of modern Italian art and architecture. For travellers interested in post-war Italian culture, it is a place where a national myth was interpreted by major artists for an audience of children. The Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi, which grew out of the original monument committee and was recognised by Presidential Decree no. 1313 of 18 July 1962, still owns and runs the park, its interactive museum and its two adventure trails.

What to notice

Two works introduce the park's artistic project: Emilio Greco's bronze Pinocchio e la Fata, and Venturino Venturi's Piazzetta dei Mosaici, a small square framed by walls covered in mosaic. From there the path climbs through the tale. Pietro Consagra's La Gatta e la Volpe represents the two swindlers who trick the puppet, while Marco Zanuso's Grande Pescecane depicts the whale that swallows him. The Fata stands at the highest point of the park, while the Carabiniere, given bowed legs, recalls the episode in which Pinocchio slips between the officer's legs. The park also includes a group of twenty-one bronze and steel works dedicated to Pinocchio and Geppetto.

Architecture counts as much as sculpture. Michelucci's Osteria del Gambero Rosso translates the tavern of the story into his own language: a hall under a great asymmetrical pitched roof, held up by branching red concrete pillars whose lobed forms evoke lobster claws — an early outing for the structural vocabulary he later made famous. The Museo e Sala del Grillo adds an indoor component, including an interactive museum and the blue horse from the tale. The planting itself was designed: Pietro Porcinai cleared glades ringed by close evergreen hedges, so each sculpture appears in a green room.

Context and history

The project began in 1953, when a national competition for a monument to Pinocchio was announced in Pescia, the town of which Collodi is a frazione, on the seventieth anniversary of the story's publication. The jury rewarded, ex aequo, Renato Baldi together with Emilio Greco and Lionello De Luigi, and Venturino Venturi. Work started in 1956 with Greco's monument, Venturi's mosaic square and the gardens laid out by Baldi and De Luigi; at the inauguration the committee announced the museum-library and the Osteria del Gambero Rosso, the latter assigned to Michelucci. In 1972 the Fondazione commissioned Marco Zanuso to extend the park onto an adjoining area of more than a hectare. The Paese dei Balocchi added sculptures and small pavilions staging further episodes, including Consagra's bronze Pinocchio, the whale and the pirates' ship. In 2026 the Fondazione marked the park's seventieth anniversary.