Pinocchio Is Tricked into Going to the Field of Miracles

Pinocchio’s journey to the Field of Miracles begins with a gift meant to take him home and ends with him abandoning that purpose for a promise of effortless wealth. The Fox and the Cat exploit both the five gold coins Mangiafoco entrusts to him for Geppetto and Pinocchio’s eagerness to believe that money can multiply without work. The turn is made especially plain to the reader by a pair of false disabilities that Pinocchio himself fails to notice.

The Gift and the Intended Return

Mangiafoco gives Pinocchio five gold coins after learning about Geppetto’s poverty. Geppetto had sold the only coat he owned, patched and worn through, to buy Pinocchio a school primer. Mangiafoco’s gift is explicitly for the father: Pinocchio is to carry the money home and give Geppetto his regards. The coins therefore begin as a practical act of compassion, tied to schooling, sacrifice, and the family’s immediate need.

Pinocchio responds with exuberant gratitude. He thanks Mangiafoco repeatedly, embraces the members of the puppet troupe one by one, including its gendarmes, and sets out for home. The story places the coming temptation against a clear, recent intention: the boy has received help for his father and is initially travelling to deliver it. His diversion is not caused by an absence of purpose but by his willingness to trade that purpose for the prospect of a larger reward.

A Performance of Mutual Affliction

Before Pinocchio has travelled half a kilometre, he encounters the Fox, lame in one foot, and the Cat, blind in both eyes. They appear to depend on each other: the Fox leans on the Cat, while the Cat lets the Fox guide him. Their coordinated helplessness presents them as fellow sufferers, a picture of mutual assistance that makes their later offer seem benevolent rather than self-interested.

The performance briefly breaks when Pinocchio reveals his coins. Proudly presenting himself as a great gentleman, he displays the five pieces and insists on their value after the Fox laughs at him and the Cat conceals his amusement by grooming his whiskers. At the sound of the gold, the Fox involuntarily straightens the leg that had seemed cramped, while the Cat opens both eyes, which shine like green lanterns, then quickly shuts them again. Pinocchio does not see this. The reader does: the apparent disabilities are a deception, and the coins expose the pair’s concealed interest even as Pinocchio takes their attention for admiration.

The Promise of the Field of Miracles

The Fox redirects the conversation from Pinocchio’s modest five coins to the possibility of multiplying them into a hundred, a thousand, or two thousand. When Pinocchio asks how, the Fox describes a supposedly blessed field in the country of the Owls, known as the Field of Miracles. The promised procedure is precise enough to sound credible: make a small hole, bury a gold coin, cover it with earth, water it with two buckets of fountain water, add a pinch of salt, and go to bed. By morning, the coin will have grown into a tree laden with gold pieces.

The Fox then supplies a calculation that turns wonder into apparent arithmetic. Each coin, he says, will yield a cluster of five hundred; burying Pinocchio’s five coins will therefore produce two thousand five hundred. The offer is not merely that Pinocchio might gain wealth, but that he can do so quickly, while sleeping, and without surrendering his original stake. The confident instructions and numerical promise make an impossible transformation sound like a reliable method.

The Fox and the Cat reinforce the pitch by presenting themselves as people who work not for selfish profit but to enrich others. Pinocchio accepts that account. In his own thoughts he regards them as admirable, despite the warning already supplied by their reactions to the coins. The gap between what the reader has seen and what Pinocchio believes gives the episode its dramatic irony: their claim of generosity is contradicted by their carefully hidden response to his money.

The Inn and the Abandoned Errand

Pinocchio agrees to accompany them, forgetting Geppetto, the new coat he hopes his father might have, the primer, and the good resolutions he had made. The lost details matter because they measure the scope of his reversal: he forgets not only a general duty to behave well, but the particular chain of sacrifice and intended repayment that brought the five coins into his hands. The promised fortune displaces the real, modest purpose of the gift.

Near evening, after a long walk, the three arrive exhausted at the Red Lobster Inn. The Fox proposes stopping to eat and rest, then setting out again at midnight so they can reach the Field of Miracles at dawn. Pinocchio pays one gold coin for supper for himself and his companions before leaving. The payment makes the temptation materially costly even before the promised planting: one of the five coins intended for Geppetto is already spent, while the destination and promised multiplication remain untested.

Reversal and Narrative Significance

The episode turns on a contrast between earned care and effortless gain. Mangiafoco gives money because he has heard of Geppetto’s hardship; the Fox and the Cat offer a scheme that detaches money from labour and redirects Pinocchio away from the person it was meant to help. Pinocchio’s mistake is prepared by the feigned disabilities, intensified by the spectacle of the coins, and completed when he accepts the Fox’s invented account of how gold grows.

The Field of Miracles functions here as a promise rather than an accomplished result. The evidence in this episode establishes the scheme, the journey’s first stop, and Pinocchio’s decision to follow the pair; it does not show the promised harvest. Instead, the closing movement leaves him travelling toward that expectation after spending one coin and abandoning his return home. The scene’s decisive change is therefore already present before he reaches the field: a gift intended to support his father has become the stake in a detour founded on deception.