Pinocchio and Lucignolo Begin Turning into Donkeys is the bodily crisis that makes the consequences of their long escape from study impossible to ignore. After five months spent playing instead of opening a book or attending school, Pinocchio wakes with ears that have grown overnight. What first appears as a grotesque change in appearance is diagnosed as donkey fever, a transformation that soon overtakes Lucignolo as well: the boys laugh at their matching ears, then lose the ability to stand and begin to assume the shape of donkeys.

Background and First Sign

The transformation follows five months of uninterrupted amusement, during which Pinocchio and Lucignolo have spent their days playing and entertaining themselves rather than seeing a book, a school, or a teacher. The long interval of pleasure makes the morning discovery abrupt: Pinocchio wakes in a bad mood and, while scratching his head, notices that his ears have grown more than a handspan. Since his ears had been so small from birth that they could scarcely be seen, their sudden size marks a startling departure from his familiar wooden-puppet appearance.

Pinocchio cannot find a mirror, so he fills the washbasin with water and looks at his reflection there. The improvised mirror confirms what his touch has already suggested: he now has a conspicuous pair of donkey ears. Their size and shape are described as resembling marsh brushes. The basin turns a private bodily change into something he can see directly; he is no longer dealing only with an odd sensation but with visible evidence that his body is changing.

Donkey Fever

The dormouse names the condition donkey fever. Pinocchio says he does not understand it, although the narration makes clear that he has understood only too well. The dormouse explains the immediate stakes: within two or three hours he will be neither a puppet nor a boy, but a real donkey like those that pull carts and carry cabbages and lettuce to market. The prediction gives the newly grown ears a direction and a deadline. They are not an isolated deformity; they are the first sign of a transformation already under way.

The dormouse also explains the change as the fate of children who become weary of books, schools, and teachers and spend their days at play. In this account, Pinocchio's leisure has a concrete consequence: his body is becoming the very working animal he would not have chosen to be. Pinocchio grabs both ears and pulls at them angrily, as if they belonged to someone else. The gesture expresses both the shock of recognition and the futility of trying to treat the new ears as detachable from himself; the dormouse says the outcome is already destined.

A Shared Transformation

Lucignolo's matching affliction changes the scene from Pinocchio's solitary discovery into a shared calamity. When the two boys see that both have suffered the same misfortune, they do not initially respond with shame or sorrow. They point out one another's enormously grown ears, make foolish faces, and laugh together. Their laughter briefly turns the signs of danger into a spectacle they can enjoy as companions.

That response ends abruptly. Lucignolo stops laughing, wavers, changes color, and asks Pinocchio for help because he can no longer stay upright. Pinocchio soon finds that he, too, cannot stand. The change is no longer limited to ears that can be mocked or pulled: both boys drop to the ground on all fours and begin moving around the room on their hands and feet. As they run, their arms become legs, their faces lengthen into muzzles, and their backs acquire light grayish fur mottled with black. The sequence makes transformation visible as a series of losses of ordinary human posture and form.

The appearance of tails is singled out as the most painful and humiliating moment. Only then, overcome by shame and grief, do the two boys try to weep and lament their fate. The reversal is sharp: what had prompted laughter when the change seemed to be no more than exaggerated ears becomes unbearable when the alteration reaches the rest of their bodies. Their shared jokes cannot undo the change, and their common predicament does not soften its physical consequences.

Consequences and Significance

The episode moves from warning to bodily proof. The dormouse's explanation connects avoidance of study and school with donkey fever; Pinocchio's ears first make that warning visible, and the changes to his and Lucignolo's limbs, faces, backs, and tails carry it further. The process is both comic and frightening: the boys laugh at their predicament, but their inability to stand and the humiliating appearance of the tails replace amusement with distress.

Pinocchio's transformation is also stated in compressed form as the outcome of the five months of revelry: donkey ears appear, and he becomes a little donkey, tail and all. The scene's staged progression gives that outcome its force. A morning discovery leads to a diagnosis and a short forecast, then to a physical change shared by both companions. The episode thus turns the boys' chosen refusal of books, schools, and teachers into an irreversible-looking bodily consequence, while ending at the point when their laughter has given way to shame and grief.