The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Adventures of Pinocchio
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The opening of Chapter 1
There was once upon a time a piece of wood in the shop of an old carpenter named Master Antonio. Everybody, however, called him Master Cherry, on account of the end of his nose, which was always as red and polished as a ripe cherry.
No sooner had Master Cherry set eyes on the piece of wood than his face beamed with delight, and, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction, he said softly to himself:
“This wood has come at the right moment; it will just do to make the leg of a little table.”
The excerpt below quotes the opening three paragraphs of Chapter 1, in which the narrator introduces Master Antonio, the carpenter everyone calls Master Cherry because of his nose, shows him finding a piece of wood in his shop, and lets him decide that it will do for the leg of a little table.
Download Full EPUB1883
Novel
42,000 words
2.3 h
Standalone
Tuscany, from a carpenter’s shop and a village school to a puppet theatre, the Field of Miracles, the Land of Boobies and the belly of the Dogfish.
Thirty-six chapters grouped into twelve parts
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.55 MB (EPUB) · 0.54 MB (AZW3) · 0.56 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #16865 · Standard Ebooks
The Adventures of Pinocchio is Carlo Collodi’s story of a puppet carved from a talking piece of wood who sets out to become a real boy and spends most of the book failing. He runs from Geppetto, kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer, sells the spelling book his father bought with his coat, and is hanged, imprisoned, turned into a donkey and swallowed by a Dogfish before he learns to work. The book is a chain of episodes, each with a warning, and the warnings are usually ignored. It was published in 1883, and this page follows the English text chapter by chapter.
The novel is a children’s book with a harsh streak: a cricket is killed in the first chapters, a puppet is hanged from an oak, a schoolfellow dies as a worn-out donkey, and the hero is nearly fried and eaten. What holds it together is the voice, which talks to the reader, and the figure of the Fairy, who forgives what the plot punishes. Wikipedia’s article on the novel traces its publication and its many adaptations. — The text is available via Project Gutenberg #16865 and Standard Ebooks.
The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page offers a summary and analysis of The Adventures of Pinocchio, with the thirty-six chapters set out in reading order, the people of the story described, and the puppet’s long education read beside the lessons the book keeps repeating. Carlo Collodi published the novel in 1883, and the text used here is Carol Della Chiesa’s English translation. The book is a chain of short episodes rather than a single plot: each chapter puts Pinocchio in a new place, offers him a warning, and lets him choose. The page follows that order, so it can be read beside a copy without running ahead of the novel. It is meant for readers who know the story and for readers who do not, and it tries not to spoil the later chapters in the earlier summaries. Readers who like the dream-logic of the book can go on to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has the same taste for a child alone among talking animals and rules that change without notice.
The story begins in the shop of Master Antonio, called Master Cherry, where a piece of wood laughs and cries like a child. Geppetto takes it home, carves a puppet, and the puppet runs away as soon as he can walk. The first chapters are a comedy of hunger: a painted saucepan, an egg that hatches instead of frying, feet burnt to cinders on a brazier. The nose grows while it is being carved, and it goes on growing whenever the puppet lies. Then comes the puppet theatre, where Harlequin and Punch recognise a brother, and Fire-Eater sneezes instead of burning him. The complete text is at Project Gutenberg #16865, and it is the text this page describes. Nothing here comes from a retelling, a play or a film: the scenes, the names and the order are the book’s. The words of the chapters are the translation’s, and wherever this page quotes a phrase it quotes that text.
The middle of the book is a tour of the ways a boy can be cheated. The Fox and the Cat sell him the Field of Miracles, where gold buried in the ground is supposed to grow; a Parrot laughs at him, a gorilla judge sends him to prison, and a farmer chains him up as a watchdog. Against these knaves stands the Fairy with the Blue Hair, who rescues him, nurses him and forgives him. He promises to study, and for a year he is first in his school. The pattern repeats so often that the book becomes a catalogue of second chances, and the reader begins to see that the plot is testing the same fault in a hundred disguises. Even the good resolutions are part of the comedy, because the book knows how easily they are made. The Fairy’s patience is the counterweight, and it is tested as hard as the puppet’s honesty.
The longest mistake is the Land of Boobies, a country with no schools where the boys play all day and are turned into donkeys for sale. Pinocchio is sold to a circus, lamed in a fall, and sold again to a man who wants a drum made of his skin. He is thrown into the sea, eaten down to the wood by fish, and swallowed by the Dogfish, where he finds his father alive after two years in the dark. The book’s other great children’s classic of the period is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which also sends a child and her made companions down a long road toward the things they think they lack. Both books trust a child to follow a strange journey without a map, and both make the journey a test of character rather than of strength. The Land of Boobies is the book’s largest invention, and its cruelty is hidden under sweets, a holiday and a coachman’s smile.
The last chapter gives him the transformation the whole book has been promising, and it is earned by work rather than by magic: five months at a gardener’s pump, a tumbler of milk for his father, five dollars given away to a sick Fairy. The English text keeps the jokes and the sharpness, and Della Chiesa’s translation gives the book its plain, quick voice. This page uses the Standard Ebooks edition, which is set from a Project Gutenberg transcription. The final image is the old wooden puppet propped against a chair, and the boy laughing at it; the book ends on that laugh rather than on a moral. For more books of the same kind, see the children’s classics shelf, where the editions are free to download. The shelf is a good place to start if this is the first Collodi you have read, and the two books named above are the nearest neighbours.
Historical Context
The book’s world is a poor, practical Italy of small towns, and the English text makes it plain in every chapter. There is a carpenter’s shop with a bench and a plane, a ground-floor room lit only from the staircase, a fireplace with a painted fire, and a village school where boys carry satchels of books. There are gendarmes and a court, an inn called the Red Crawfish, a puppet theatre, a circus and a seaport. Money is counted in dollars and cents in this translation, and one of the towns is called Trap for Blockheads. Collodi published the novel in Florence in 1883, and the society it describes is one of small trades, thin coats and hungry winters. The book never names a year, and the world it builds is closer to a fable than to a map.
The novel belongs to a literature that expected stories to teach, and its lessons are unusually literal. A Talking Cricket acts as conscience and is killed for his trouble; the Fairy rewards study and punishes idleness; a boy who avoids school is turned into a donkey and sold. The book does not soften the arithmetic: the hungry puppet eats pear rinds, the old man sells his coat, the friend dies worn out in a gardener’s stable. The English text keeps the direct address to the reader and the chapter-ending warnings, and it keeps the comedy that makes the warnings bearable. The result is a moral tale that children enjoy for the mischief and adults read for the cruelty. The narrator’s asides are part of the method, and they are addressed to the child directly, as if the story were being told at a bedside.
This edition is a translation, and the page is careful to quote the English text rather than guess at the original. Carol Della Chiesa’s version turns the story into brisk English prose, with the names that have become standard in English: Geppetto, Pinocchio, the Fox and the Cat, Fire-Eater, Candlewick. The Standard Ebooks edition is based on a Project Gutenberg transcription made by Mark C. Orton, Melissa Er-Raqabi and Distributed Proofreaders, with scans from the HathiTrust Digital Library. The chapter numbers are the edition’s, and the wording quoted here is the translation’s. Readers who want the Italian should go to the original; this page describes what the English text says. The translation’s choices are the ones quoted on this page, and they are followed from the first chapter to the last.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Pinocchio: A puppet carved from a piece of wood that could laugh and cry, and the book’s hero. He is brave, hungry, quick to promise and quicker to forget, and his nose grows whenever he lies. He runs away, is cheated, hanged, imprisoned, turned into a donkey and swallowed by a Dogfish before he learns to work for his father.
- Geppetto: The old woodcarver who makes the puppet and calls him his son. The village boys call him Pudding because of his yellow wig, and he is poor, fiery and proud. He sells his only coat to buy a spelling book, goes to sea to look for Pinocchio, and lives inside the Dogfish for nearly two years on tinned food before he is found.
- The Fairy with the Blue Hair: The beautiful child with blue hair who first appears at a window in the wood and sends a falcon to cut the hanged puppet down. She nurses him, teaches him, and later meets him as a grown woman on an island. A marble stone says she died of grief; she returns, forgives him, and is ill in hospital at the end.
- The Talking Cricket: The talking insect who tells Pinocchio that disobedient boys come to no good and is killed with a hammer for it. He comes back as one of the three doctors who argue over the sick puppet, and at the end he owns the straw hut where Pinocchio and Geppetto shelter. He is the book’s conscience, and it has a long memory.
- The Fox and the Cat: Two vagabonds, a lame Fox and a blind Cat, who travel together and live by their wits. They sell Pinocchio the Field of Miracles, rob the money he buries, and chase him through the night in charcoal sacks. The Cat loses a paw in the chase, and the Fox invents a wolf to explain it. At the end the Cat is really blind and the Fox has lost his tail.
- Candlewick: Romeo, called Candlewick because he is thin and bright like a wick, is the laziest boy in the school and Pinocchio’s closest friend. He persuades Pinocchio to the Land of Boobies, turns into a donkey with him, and is sold. Pinocchio meets him again as a dying donkey at the gardener’s, and speaks his own name before he dies.
Core Literary Themes
- Disobedience and its price: Every episode is built on the same hinge: a warning is given, Pinocchio ignores it, and something is taken from him. He loses his feet, his gold, his freedom and his human shape. The book is not subtle about the arithmetic, and it does not always let him off. Yet the punishments are not final, and that is the point: the story keeps offering another chapter. The Talking Cricket states the rule at the start, the Fairy repeats it, and the plot enforces it with hunger, prison and the circus. No punishment lasts forever, but none is forgotten either.
- Lies and the growing nose: The nose is the book’s most famous invention, and it works as a physical register of a moral fact. When Pinocchio lies to the Fairy about the gold pieces, the nose grows until it cannot pass through the door; woodpeckers restore it. Later, when he lies to an old man about his own good character, it lengthens and then shortens when he tells the truth. The English text calls lying the most disgraceful fault a boy can have, and gives the fault a body that everyone can see. The body remembers what the tongue denies.
- Work, money and the Field of Miracles: The book contrasts two ways of getting money: the Fox’s field, where coins are sown and watered, and the gardener’s pump, where a tumbler of milk costs a hundred buckets of water. The first is a fantasy of ease and ends in robbery and prison; the second is slow, wet and real, and it buys Geppetto’s milk, while the baskets he makes in his spare time become the Fairy’s five dollars. The Parrot’s speech states the lesson plainly: money is earned by hands or brains. The book believes it, and makes its hero prove it before he is allowed to change. The Field of Miracles is a satire of every promise of easy money.
- Becoming a boy: The transformation is the end of a long series of changes: wood to puppet, puppet to donkey, donkey back to puppet, and only then to boy. The first changes follow his choices, and the last one follows work and care for his father rather than a spell. The Fairy sets the condition and the dream confirms it. When Pinocchio looks at the old puppet propped against a chair, the book lets him laugh at what he was, which is the closest it comes to a happy ending. The book is less interested in magic than in the work that makes the change believable.
- Love, hunger and forgiveness: For all its punishments, the book is tender about need. Geppetto gives away his breakfast and his coat; the Fairy feeds and nurses a puppet who has done nothing to deserve it; the Tunny and Alidoro repay kindness. Hunger is the book’s most constant feeling, and food is its most frequent proof of love. The final purse of fifty gold pieces is a reward, but the five dollars given away first are the real test, and the book is careful to have him pass it. The purse is a gift, but the milk is the proof.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Adventures of Pinocchio?
The download is the whole novel: thirty-six chapters, from the piece of wood in Master Cherry’s shop to the boy looking at the old puppet in the corner, with nothing abridged and no chapter missing. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition, set from the Project Gutenberg transcription made by Mark C. Orton, Melissa Er-Raqabi and Distributed Proofreaders, and the spelling and punctuation are the edition’s.
Around the text the page supplies what a first reading needs: twelve grouped chapter summaries that stop where their chapters stop, six character notes, five themes, and a historical note on the book’s world and its translation. The groups are ours; the chapters and their numbers are the edition’s. It is meant to be read beside the novel, not instead of it, and it keeps the surprises of the later chapters out of the earlier summaries.
The files come in three formats with the same text and the same chapter breaks. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle, by USB or through Send to Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. No account is needed for any of them, and nothing in the downloads is locked, watermarked or time limited.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text of The Adventures of Pinocchio is set from the Project Gutenberg transcription by Mark C. Orton, Melissa Er-Raqabi and Distributed Proofreaders.
- Complete text in thirty-six chapters Every chapter from I to XXXVI, numbered as the edition numbers them, with no chapter text abridged.
- Chapter summaries in reading order Twelve grouped summaries from the carpenter’s shop to the boy at the mirror, each keyed to the chapters it covers and stopping at their end.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the chapter breaks and the chapter numbers intact.
- The 1865 dream-book that took a Victorian child down a rabbit hole and made nonsense a serious pleasure, and the nearest classic to this one in temper. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The 1900 American fairy tale of a girl, a scarecrow and a wizard, the other great children’s book of the century’s turn. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The shelf that collects the site’s children’s books in one place, from talking animals to invented countries and long roads home. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The novel has thirty-six chapters, numbered I to XXXVI, and the page keeps the edition’s numbering. The twelve groups are ours, added to make the book easy to follow: each begins where its first chapter begins and stops where its last chapter stops, so the page can be read beside the novel without running ahead of it. Chapters are cited by number throughout, and the same numbering is in all three downloads.
- Chapters 1–3 — A piece of wood in a carpenter’s shop: Master Antonio, the carpenter called Master Cherry, finds a piece of wood that laughs and cries like a child. Geppetto, the old man the boys call Pudding, takes it home, carves a puppet and names him Pinocchio. The nose grows as it is cut, the puppet runs into the street, and a soldier leads Geppetto to prison.
- Chapters 4–7 — The Cricket, hunger and burnt feet: Pinocchio comes home, is scolded by the Talking Cricket, and throws a hammer that kills him. Hunger follows: the saucepan on the hearth is painted, and the egg he tries to cook hatches into a chicken. He falls asleep with his feet on the brazier, burns them to cinders, and Geppetto returns with three pears.
- Chapters 8–12 — New feet, a spelling book and the puppet theatre: Geppetto makes new feet, clothes the puppet in paper and bark, and sells his only coat for a spelling book. Pinocchio sells the book for a dime to see the puppet show, where Harlequin and Punch recognise him. Fire-Eater sneezes, pardons him, and sends him home with five gold pieces.
- Chapters 13–15 — The Fox and the Cat and the Big Oak: At the inn of the Red Crawfish the Fox and the Cat talk of the Field of Miracles, where money buried in the ground grows. The Cricket warns him and vanishes. Two assassins in charcoal sacks chase him through the night; he bites off a cat’s paw, and they hang him from the Big Oak.
- Chapters 16–18 — The Fairy, the medicine and the Field of Miracles: The Fairy with the Blue Hair sends a falcon to cut him down, and three doctors, a Crow, an Owl and the Talking Cricket, argue over him. He refuses his medicine, takes it, then lies about the gold pieces and his nose grows until woodpeckers shorten it. He meets the Fox and the Cat and buries four gold pieces.
- Chapters 19–22 — Robbed, imprisoned and set to guard a kennel: A Parrot tells him the money has been stolen. The judge, a gorilla, sends the robbed puppet to prison for four months; a victory frees him. A serpent blocks the road, and that night he is caught in a trap and set to guard a farmer’s kennel. He catches the polecats, and the farmer lets him go.
- Chapters 23–25 — The tombstone, the sea and the Fairy’s promise: He finds a marble stone saying the child with blue hair died of grief, then sees Geppetto’s boat sink and swims after him. He reaches an island, where a woman turns out to be the Fairy, now grown. He promises to study, and she says becoming a boy depends on him.
- Chapters 26–29 — School, the Dogfish story and the frying pan: At school he is teased, fights, and a boy is struck by an arithmetic book. Gendarmes arrest him; he escapes, is chased into the sea by the mastiff Alidoro, and caught in a green fisherman’s net. Alidoro carries him off. The Snail keeps him waiting, his foot sticks in the door, and the Fairy pardons him.
- Chapters 30–31 — Candlewick and the Land of Boobies: The Fairy lets him invite his friends to a breakfast, and Candlewick (Romeo) tempts him to the Land of Boobies, where there are no schools. A coachman with twenty-four donkeys in white kid boots takes the boys away. Pinocchio spends five months in play before he wakes with a pair of donkey’s ears.
- Chapters 32–33 — Donkey ears and the circus: He and Candlewick have become donkeys and can only bray. The coachman sells them, and Pinocchio is bought by a circus, where he is taught to dance and jump through hoops. A fall lames him, and he is sold again, this time to a man who wants his skin for a drum.
- Chapters 34–35 — Swallowed by the Dogfish: Thrown into the sea with a stone round his neck, Pinocchio is eaten down to the wood by fish and comes up a puppet again. A blue goat beckons, but the Dogfish swallows him. Inside he finds Geppetto, who has lived there two years on tinned food from a sunken ship, and they escape on the puppet’s shoulders.
- Chapter 36 — The boy at last: Pinocchio swims all night with his father, and the Tunny carries them ashore. In a straw hut the Talking Cricket sends him to a gardener for milk. A Snail tells him the Fairy is ill. He works five months at the gardener’s pump, gives his five dollars to the Fairy, and wakes as a boy, with a purse of fifty gold pieces and Geppetto well again.
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Part of: Children’s Classics · 1880s
