Carabinieri

The Carabinieri recur at moments when Pinocchio’s impulsive escapes collide with public authority. Their interventions are brisk and physical: one officer catches him by his oversized nose, and later two officers detain him after finding him beside an injured schoolmate. Yet neither encounter produces a simple victory for law and order. In the first, a crowd’s mistaken judgment sends Geppetto to prison in Pinocchio’s place; in the second, Pinocchio slips away while ostensibly retrieving his cap. A pair of wooden gendarmes, meanwhile, reproduce the image of armed authority inside Mangiafoco’s puppet troupe, where they are ordered to seize Arlecchino. Across these episodes, the Carabinieri are less a developed set of individual characters than a recurring force whose actions expose the disorder, comedy, and sudden vulnerability of the world Pinocchio moves through.

Identity and Narrative Function

The Carabinieri appear in several distinct forms: an officer on the street, two officers investigating an injured boy, and two wooden gendarmes in a puppet company. The first two appearances place them within ordinary public life, where they can stop a runaway puppet, take someone into custody, and arrange for an injured child to be cared for. The wooden pair are instead figures within Mangiafoco’s company, but their uniforms and drawn swords give them the recognizable appearance of coercive authority. The recurring image links actual policing with theatrical representation without making the wooden figures equivalent to the officers in the street.

The episodes also show how quickly the narrative moves between danger and comedy. A police officer mistakes Pinocchio’s pounding wooden feet and frantic flight for the behavior of a colt that has thrown off its master. Later, a pursuit involving a prizewinning mastiff disappears into a cloud of dust before anyone can see its outcome. The officers’ presence raises the stakes, but the scenes keep the unstable, episodic rhythm of Pinocchio’s adventures: arrest, release, and escape can follow one another without settling his conduct or his safety.

The First Capture and Geppetto’s Imprisonment

When Geppetto runs after Pinocchio through the street, the puppet’s wooden feet make a clatter like many pairs of farmers’ clogs. People stop to watch and laugh. Hearing the commotion, a Carabiniere assumes that a colt has run away from its owner and plants himself across the road to stop it. Pinocchio sees the officer blocking the way and tries to dart between his legs, but the attempt fails. The officer catches him neatly by the nose, which is so large that it seems made to be seized, and returns him to Geppetto.

Geppetto means to correct Pinocchio by pulling his ears, only to discover that the puppet has none: in the haste of carving him, Geppetto forgot to make them. The crowd then intervenes, interpreting the attempted punishment as evidence that Geppetto is a tyrant who might tear the puppet to pieces. Yielding to the public outcry, the Carabiniere releases Pinocchio and takes Geppetto to prison instead. Geppetto cannot defend himself in the moment; as he is led away, he weeps and laments the effort he spent trying to make Pinocchio a good puppet.

The reversal makes the officer’s first apparently successful intervention profoundly uneven in its result. Pinocchio is caught and handed back, but Geppetto—not the runaway—ends up in custody because the spectators’ accusation changes how the scene is judged. The narrator postpones the account of what happens next, then begins a new episode with Pinocchio free and Geppetto being taken away. The Carabinieri’s action thus serves as a sharp hinge between the street’s comic chase and Pinocchio’s next solitary adventure.

The Wooden Gendarmes in Mangiafoco’s Company

A different pair of gendarmes appears in Mangiafoco’s puppet company. When Mangiafoco decides that Arlecchino should be bound and thrown onto the fire in order to roast his mutton, two wooden officers immediately appear. They are described as very tall and thin, wearing cocked hats and carrying drawn swords. Mangiafoco orders them to seize Arlecchino, bind him securely, and cast him into the flames.

These figures do not carry out the street arrests, and the passage presents them as puppets under Mangiafoco’s command rather than as independent officers. Their appearance nevertheless gives the scene a pointed theatrical likeness to public force: uniformed figures arrive at an order, armed and ready to bind someone. Here, authority is not shown deciding what justice requires; it is an instrument wielded by the master of the troupe. The contrast with the street scenes is concrete. The Carabinieri respond to commotion or investigate an injury, whereas Mangiafoco summons wooden enforcers to impose his will on a fellow puppet.

Arrest, Escape, and the Pursuit

Later, after Pinocchio fights with his classmates and Eugenio is left injured, two Carabinieri approach. They find Pinocchio lying on the ground and ask what he is doing; he says that he is assisting his schoolmate. They then ask who owns the book they have found, and Pinocchio says it is his. The officers treat this answer as sufficient and order him to get up and come with them, repeating the order when he protests that he is innocent.

Before leaving, the Carabinieri call to fishermen passing nearby in a boat and entrust the wounded boy to them, asking them to take him home and care for him until the officers return the following day. They then place Pinocchio between them and begin taking him away. The arrangement separates the two boys’ immediate needs: the fishermen are to look after Eugenio, while the officers take Pinocchio into custody.

Pinocchio asks to retrieve his cap. The officers let him go on the condition that he do it quickly; he picks up the cap but puts it between his teeth instead of on his head, then runs at full speed toward the seashore. Judging that they cannot catch him themselves, the Carabinieri set a large mastiff after him, a dog that has won first prize in every dog race. Pinocchio runs, but the dog runs faster. People gather at windows and in the street to watch the fierce race; then the runners raise so much dust that, after a few minutes, nothing can be seen. The episode leaves the chase unresolved in the officers’ immediate scene, turning their attempted custody into another spectacle of flight.

Authority and Repetition

The Carabinieri’s encounters with Pinocchio repeatedly begin with a practical response to disorder: stop the runaway, investigate an injured schoolboy, or secure a detained suspect. Yet the outcomes resist a neat picture of reliable control. The first officer returns Pinocchio to Geppetto, only for the crowd to reverse the situation and Geppetto to be imprisoned. The later officers secure care for Eugenio and detain Pinocchio, but their permission for him to collect his cap gives him the opening to escape. Their authority is real, but each episode shows how circumstance, public reaction, or Pinocchio’s sudden movement can redirect its effects.

That pattern makes the Carabinieri a recurring measure of how exposed Pinocchio is in the world beyond home and school. They can seize him by the nose, place him between them, and send a racing mastiff after him; they can also act on an interpretation that proves unjust to Geppetto or lose sight of the fugitive in a cloud of dust. The wooden gendarmes sharpen the motif by reducing armed enforcement to a visible stage device. Together, these appearances make authority part of the story’s shifting landscape: at once a source of restraint, a target of escape, and an image that can be turned to very different purposes.