Carlo Collodi

Carlo Lorenzini was born in Florence in November 1826 and spent decades as a journalist and humorist before adopting the pen name Carlo Collodi. In 1881 he began serializing The Adventures of Pinocchio, a fairy tale about a carved marionette whose nose grows with every lie. The novel became his defining work, though he wrote it late in a career built on satire and children's stories. Collodi died in October 1890, seventeen years before his puppet would be translated worldwide and outlive every other Italian fictional character.