Parenting & Family Quote by Carlo Collodi

A carpenter finding a plank that sobs and giggles is Collodi’s way of booby-trapping the comforts of the everyday. Mastro Cherry is pure working-class practicality: measure, plane, sell, repeat. Then a piece of wood behaves like a child, and the workshop stops being a place where objects become useful and turns into a stage where conscience, appetite, and unruly life announce themselves. The sentence reads like a folktale headline, but its real trick is how quickly it shifts power. The craftsman thinks he’s the maker; the material insists it has its own interiority. That reversal is the seed of Pinocchio’s whole moral universe: you can carve a body, but you can’t sand down desire.

Collodi’s intent isn’t just whimsy. It’s social satire with a sugar coating. In post-unification Italy, education and “proper” citizenship were civic obsessions, especially for the poor. Pinocchio begins not with a noble birth or divine blessing, but with labor and scrap. A crying, laughing plank suggests that childhood itself is already noisy, inconvenient, and resistant to being shaped into a compliant product. Mastro Cherry’s name (a little comic, a little cheap) underlines the joke: the adult world tries to domesticate life with labels and tools, and life keeps cracking jokes back.

“Wept and laughed” also foreshadows the book’s uneasy emotional register: slapstick and cruelty, tenderness and punishment, often in the same scene. Collodi primes us for a story where enchantment isn’t an escape from reality but a way of exposing how hard reality works to discipline the “child” inside the wood.