Pinocchio Rescues Alidoro, Who Saves Him from the Green Fisherman

Pinocchio Rescues Alidoro, Who Saves Him from the Green Fisherman is a two-part rescue episode built around a reversal of pursuit: Pinocchio saves Alidoro from drowning, and Alidoro later saves Pinocchio from being cooked. The danger first comes from the mastiff’s chase and then from the Green Fisherman’s net and cooking fire. Between those perils, Pinocchio chooses to help an enemy when he could leave him to die; the later rescue makes that choice consequential, giving the episode’s principle of mutual aid a literal, life-preserving form.

The Chase and Alidoro’s Peril

The episode opens in the wake of a pursuit by the Carabinieri, who set a large mastiff after Pinocchio when they judge that catching him themselves will be difficult. The dog is Alidoro, a champion racer, and he steadily closes the distance. Pinocchio can hear the animal panting just behind him and feel the heat of its breath. The beach is near, but the pursuer is nearly upon him, making the approaching sea both a possible escape route and a fresh danger.

Pinocchio leaps into the water like a frog. Alidoro cannot stop in time and is carried in after him by the force of the chase. Unlike Pinocchio, the mastiff cannot swim: he paws at the water to stay afloat, but the more he struggles, the farther his head sinks beneath the surface. When he comes up again, he is terrified and cries for help. Pinocchio initially answers from a position of safety, but Alidoro’s pleas change the scene from escape to a choice about whether to save the animal that had been hunting him.

Pinocchio Chooses to Help

Pinocchio does not immediately swim back. He first asks Alidoro to promise that he will stop troubling him and chasing him. Alidoro agrees urgently, warning that another half-minute may be too late. Pinocchio then recalls Geppetto’s repeated advice that doing a good deed never brings a loss. That remembered counsel is the decisive turn: instead of treating his own safety as a reason to abandon the mastiff, Pinocchio swims to him, grips his tail with both hands, and brings him safely onto the dry sand.

The rescue is concrete and difficult rather than ceremonial. Alidoro is so exhausted that he cannot stand, and he has swallowed so much salt water that his body is swollen like a balloon. Pinocchio does not simply resume their journey together. Wary of trusting him too much, he plunges back into the sea and swims away from shore, calling a farewell to the dog he has just saved. The exchange leaves their new relationship open: Alidoro is grateful, but the two part without assurance that their paths will cross again.

A New Danger in the Fisherman’s Net

Swimming close to land, Pinocchio reaches what seems to be a safer place. On the rocks he notices a cave with a long plume of smoke rising from it and decides to approach, hoping to dry and warm himself. As he tries to climb the rocks, something rises beneath the water and lifts him into the air. He finds himself enclosed in a large net among fish of many shapes and sizes, all struggling inside the mesh.

The Green Fisherman emerges from the cave and hauls in the catch. Pinocchio is the last creature left in the net. When the fisherman pulls him out, he stares at the puppet in astonishment and treats him as an unfamiliar kind of fish. Pinocchio insists that he is a puppet, not a fish, and points out that he can speak and reason. The fisherman acknowledges those abilities but uses them to frame the intended meal as a special courtesy: Pinocchio may choose between being fried in a pan and cooked in a pot with tomato sauce. Pinocchio asks instead to be set free and allowed to go home, but the fisherman refuses to give up so rare a catch.

The danger is sharpened by Pinocchio’s own regret. As the fisherman prepares him for the pan, Pinocchio cries that he should have gone to school and blames himself for listening to his companions. His words connect the immediate threat to an earlier decision, but they do not stop the fisherman. The puppet is about to be thrown into the pan when a hungry dog, drawn to the cave by the smell of frying, enters and catches the fisherman’s attention.

Alidoro Repays the Rescue

The dog is Alidoro. Pinocchio recognizes the chance to call for help and cries out by name, warning that he will be fried unless Alidoro saves him. Alidoro recognizes Pinocchio’s voice coming from the flour-covered bundle in the fisherman’s hand. He leaps, takes the bundle gently in his teeth, and runs out of the cave at speed. The fisherman tries to pursue the stolen catch but manages only a few steps before a coughing fit forces him to turn back.

Alidoro carries Pinocchio along the path toward the village, then stops and sets him gently on the ground. Pinocchio thanks him. Alidoro answers that no thanks are needed: Pinocchio saved him, and now he has repaid the deed; in the world, everyone must help one another. He explains that he had been lying on the beach, nearly dead, when the wind carried the scent of frying to him. Hunger led him to follow it into the cave, where he found Pinocchio in danger. The rescue is therefore not a planned search but the meeting of a remembered obligation with an accidental opportunity to act.

Reciprocal Aid as the Episode’s Turning Point

The sequence reverses the relation between pursuer and pursued twice. First, Alidoro chases Pinocchio, but the chase ends with the mastiff helpless in the sea and dependent on the puppet he had been pursuing. Later, Pinocchio is helpless in a net and in the Green Fisherman’s grasp, while Alidoro becomes his rescuer. The change is not secured by force or a lasting alliance; it depends on recognition, gratitude, and the earlier choice to intervene.

Geppetto’s advice supplies the link between the two scenes. Pinocchio remembers it when deciding whether to save Alidoro, and the consequence arrives when Alidoro returns that help under circumstances Pinocchio could not have anticipated. The episode does not erase the initial hostility between them: Pinocchio leaves the beach cautiously after rescuing the mastiff. Instead, it makes the act of mercy matter beyond the moment in which it is performed. A former enemy becomes an ally because help has been given and remembered, and the same principle that guided Pinocchio’s action gives Alidoro a reason to save him in turn.