Arlecchino

Arlecchino is a wooden puppet actor in Mangiafoco’s company whose warm recognition of Pinocchio and later peril make him central to the episode’s movement from theatrical welcome to threatened sacrifice and reciprocal rescue. First a comic performer among the troupe, he becomes the first puppet to call Pinocchio a brother; when Mangiafoco later chooses him as fuel for a roast, Pinocchio’s intervention repays that welcome with action.

Identity and Stage Role

When Pinocchio enters the puppet theater, a performance is already under way. Arlecchino and Pulcinella are quarreling onstage, trading insults and threatening to exchange slaps and cudgel blows. The audience laughs at their argument, which the narrator describes as so lifelike that the puppets seem like reasonable animals and people of the world. Arlecchino is thus introduced through a comic part built on quarrelsome action: he performs conflict so convincingly that the audience responds as if watching a familiar human dispute.

That comic routine changes abruptly when Arlecchino stops acting and turns toward the audience. He has noticed Pinocchio at the back of the theater and signals him out. The interruption makes the stage porous: the performer abandons his assigned quarrel to address someone in the audience, and the play gives way to an unscripted-seeming encounter between puppets.

Recognition and Kinship

Arlecchino calls Pinocchio onto the stage and invites him into the arms of his wooden brothers. The invitation is not merely a greeting; it gives Pinocchio an immediate place within the company. The other puppets join in, announcing their recognition and welcoming him, but Arlecchino initiates the encounter by identifying him and opening the way for him to cross from audience to stage.

Pinocchio answers with a sequence of leaps: from the back of the theater to the better seats, onto the orchestra conductor’s head, and finally onto the stage. The company’s welcome then becomes physical. The puppets crowd around him with embraces, neck squeezes, affectionate pinches, and head-bumps, gestures the narrator presents as signs of genuine fraternity. Arlecchino’s invitation thus leads to a public reunion in which belonging is expressed through touch and exuberant disorder, rather than through the continuation of the performance.

The Threat to Arlecchino

After the play, the danger shifts from staged violence to Mangiafoco’s practical demand for firewood. In the kitchen, a mutton roast turns slowly on a spit, but Mangiafoco lacks enough wood to finish cooking and browning it. He orders Arlecchino and Pulcinella to bring him the puppet hanging from a nail, judging that its dry wood will make a fine flame. Pinocchio is carried in as the intended fuel, struggling in their arms and crying out for his father.

Arlecchino and Pulcinella hesitate at first, but Mangiafoco’s angry look frightens them into obeying. The change from the stage’s comic threats to this forced errand is stark: Arlecchino, who moments earlier had greeted Pinocchio as family, now has to carry him toward a real danger under the authority of their master. His hesitation registers a reluctance the command overcomes, though the evidence does not show him openly refusing Mangiafoco.

The danger then turns upon Arlecchino himself. Mangiafoco orders two long, thin wooden gendarmes, armed with drawn sabers, to bind Arlecchino and throw him onto the fire so the mutton will roast properly. Arlecchino’s legs buckle and he falls face down in terror. The reversal makes the threat’s logic plain: the puppets are treated as combustible material, and the one who helped deliver Pinocchio is now selected to take his place.

Pardon and Reciprocal Loyalty

Pinocchio responds to Arlecchino’s threatened execution by throwing himself at Mangiafoco’s feet. Weeping, he pleads for his friend and wets the master’s long beard with his tears. Mangiafoco relents toward Pinocchio, calls him a good boy, and accepts a kiss that Pinocchio places on the tip of his nose after climbing up the beard. Arlecchino, still frightened, asks in a faint voice whether the pardon has truly been granted. Mangiafoco confirms that it has, accepting a half-raw mutton dinner rather than burning either puppet that evening.

The rescue reverses the direction of the earlier welcome. Arlecchino first made room for Pinocchio among the wooden brothers; now Pinocchio acts to keep Arlecchino alive. The scene does not erase the company’s subjection to Mangiafoco: the pardon is his decision, and his warning makes clear that he may demand obedience another time. But Arlecchino’s peril gives Pinocchio the chance to turn the fraternity he received into a concrete act of loyalty.

Once Arlecchino is spared, the puppets rush onto the stage, light the lamps and chandeliers as if for a gala, and dance on until dawn. The celebration follows a reprieve that has interrupted both the show and Mangiafoco’s dinner plans. Arlecchino’s episode therefore links the theater’s comic fellowship to a more serious bond: the embrace that welcomes Pinocchio is followed by a rescue in which he protects one of the brothers who welcomed him.