In the bicentenary of Collodi, while the boys return to the squares and ask adults to be heard, Pinocchio asks us a surprisingly contemporary question: to educate means to teach a child our melody or to help him find his own? From Fiorenzo Carpi to Lucio Dalla and Rossini, from Mozart to Bach and Clara Wieck, musicological journey in the most difficult counterpoint of all: that between generations.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
27 October 2026
On Saturday 24 October, in Piazza IV Novembre in Perugia, among the students of the high school appeared a sign of few words.
«Listen to us, don't ignore us».
It was certainly not a phrase intended to enter rhetoric manuals. He did not possess the elegance of the great political posters of the twentieth century, nor did he claim to have it. It was almost elementary.
Maybe that's why he was disturbing.
Because he was asking for something much harder than consent.
Asked. Listen.
In those same weeks high school students and university students returned to the squares of many Italian cities. They spoke of school, carovita, rents, right to study, war, environment, future; some demonstrations took place peacefully, others have known tensions and violent actions, which are not confused with the right to manifest or romanticized as inevitable youth language. On October 16, the parades were held in different cities; the 24 new protests still crossed Rome, Turin, Bologna and other centers.
You may agree with a protest or not be.
You can discuss slogans, contest solutions, refuse violence without hesitation.
But it remains a matter before all the others.
Are we still able to listen to a generation when he says something that does not coincide with what we would like to hear them say?
The coincidence, in this fall of 2026, has something almost literary.
In a few weeks, on November 24, exactly two hundred years after the birth of Carlo Lorenzini, who the world would learn how to know Carlo Collodi. In Italy the bicentenary is reporting Pinocchio outside the children’s library: exhibitions, meetings, readings, initiatives that will continue in 2027 also seek in the puppet what perhaps there has always been and that we adults, busy explaining to children who do not lie, we sometimes forgot to see.
Why Pinocchio It is not only the story of a child who must learn to behave well.
It is also the story of a father who must learn to have a son.
And it's not the same thing at all.
A carpenter commits an understandable error
Geppetto is a man who knows wood.
He looks at it and imagines what might become.
It is the privilege of the artisan: to see a form where others still see only matter.
A table, chair, toy.
Measure.
Cut.
Clasp.
Levigate.
Correct.
Take away what's over.
Straighten up what you owe.
Then one day Geppetto applies this wisdom to something that, with his considerable surprise, decides not to behave like a chair.
Pinocchio was born and almost immediately disobeyed.
Thinking about it, he has a perfect timing.
He doesn't even wait for his father to end up building it to start subtracting the project.
And that's where Geppetto's trade meets its own limit.
Wood can be shaped. No son.
Or, at least, not the same way.
A child can be educated, protected, accompanied, correct. He needs rules, limits, even some healthy "no", a word that in recent decades has alternated pedagogical luck but has not yet completely lost its usefulness.
What cannot be is the finished product of the imagination of those who generated it.
Enzo D’Alò, returning this year on his Pinocchio On the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the Neptune, he said it with great clarity: his Geppetto is one of those parents who would like to model his son according to his desire, while his son claims his autonomy. For this reason, in his reading, the journey does not only educate Pinocchio: both of us.
It's a decisive perspective.
Because we're used to asking when Pinocchio finally becomes a good boy.
Much less often we ask ourselves:
when Geppetto finally becomes the father of that real boy, instead of the imagined son in his shop?
Our time speaks a lot. Are you listening?
This question becomes less literary if we leave the shop and return to our homes.
On 30 September the INAPP published the results of an investigation of 4,750 children and young Italians between seven and fourteen years. The data tells us something that should be of interest to us at least as the number of hours spent in front of the smartphone: in the passage towards preadolescence significantly decreases the perception of being listened to by the parents and also decreases the possibility, warned by the boys, to participate in the family decisions that concern them. On average, 90.7 percent already owns a personal smartphone and 55.3 percent use social media daily or almost.
It would be very convenient to conclude that the blame is on the phone.
When adults do not fully understand a change, a car to accuse is always providential.
It was the novel.
Then the filmmaker.
Then television.
Then video games.
Now the smartphone, which undoubtedly has many responsibilities and, however, the unique misfortune of not being able to respond to our accusations.
The most interesting point of data is another.
We live in families where it is technically possible to reach us at any time.
Messages.
Chat.
Video calls.
Shared positions.
Notifications.
And yet the connection does not necessarily coincide with theListen.
In fact, the two things can even diverge.
You may know where a son is without knowing where he is going.
You can check when you entered WhatsApp without knowing what you can't tell us.
You can receive a message every ten minutes and have not heard a phrase pronounced at the table.
Perhaps this is the strange condition of our time: we have never possessed so many tools to feel us and it is not at all certain that we have learned to listen better.
And that's why that Perugia sign — «Listen to us, don't ignore us» — goes beyond the chronicle of the event in which he appeared.
It could be hung out of many teenage rooms.
With a difference.
In the house, often, it is not written.
In music, however, listening is not optional
Music has known this problem for centuries.
A musician can be technically flawless and yet unable to play with others.
It is one of the most educational humiliations of musical practice.
You can have a wonderful sound.
Perfect intonation.
A very elegant phrasing.
You can know every note.
And ruin everything because you didn't listen to what happens next to you.
In overall music listening is not a moral quality.
It is a structural need.
If the first violin anticipates, the cello must feel it.
If the clarinet changes color, the bassoon must notice.
If a voice slightly slows down the closing of a sentence, the other cannot continue by consulting only its inner metronome.
Playing together means continually performing a very difficult task: remain if you are changing in relation to others.
It is not a bad definition of a family too.
And perhaps music can help us understand why the relationship between parents and children inevitably becomes difficult when children grow.
Because at first the relationship can resemble a melody with accompaniment.
The child almost entirely depends on the adult.
The parent decides times, places, rules, nutrition, movements. Possied — and must possess — a disproportionate responsibility.
Then a second line appears.
First shy.
Then with ever greater obstinacy.
A taste.
An opinion.
A friendship we would not have chosen.
A music we can't stand.
An incomprehensible dress.
A different political idea.
A vocation we had hoped didn't come to him.
A terrible phrase:
«I don't think like you.».
And there the accompanied melody is over.
Start the counterpoint.
The second voice is not a mistake of the first
In the counterpoint, a voice does not become legitimate because it repeats the other.
On the contrary.
Beauty is born from the relationship between different lines that preserve their own melodic logic.
They meet.
They're moving away.
They imitate each other.
Sometimes they collide.
They produce consonances and dissonances.
And they keep going.
Even the canon, which might seem the most perfect form of musical obedience, tells something more interesting.
A voice sets out.
The other comes in later.
He takes what he has heard, but he does distance.
Distance from time, often at interval distance.
If he entered exactly at the same time, on the same height, with the same intensity, we would not have two voices.
We'd only feel one stronger.
It is a beautiful image of inheritance.
A child can receive our theme.
He must not sing it in unison with us.
To become a second voice must, sooner or later, enter elsewhere.
Perhaps one of the subtlest errors of parental love is to confuse continuity with similarity.
We want to recognize ourselves in children.
It's natural.
We look for our profile in their face, our way of laughing, a talent, a passion.
And when we find them, we try the little vertigo of survival.
But a human being is not our correct reprint.
The most successful legacy is not the one that produces a copy. That's what makes a change possible.
Bach teaches us beautifully.
Mr. Bach had enough ungrateful children to change music
Johann Sebastian Bach personally taught his children.
Carl Philipp Emanuel recalled that he had not had, for the composition and for the keyboard, another master than the father.
He would have had all the reasons to become a small Johann Sebastian.
Luckily, he didn't.
Carl Philipp Emanuel would develop a language in which baroque symmetry is cracked, the gesture becomes sudden, affection changes rapidly, silence acquires tension: that world of♪ looking towards a new sensibility.
Johann Christian, the youngest son, takes another path: Italy, Milan, London, opera, galant style, melodic clarity, a relationship with form that will profoundly influence the young Mozart. He had been educated by his father and, after the death of Johann Sebastian, brother-in-law Carl Philipp Emanuel; yet his musical language already belongs to another world.
Let's think.
If we measured Bach's educational success from the likeness of children to his music, we should talk about a half failure.
If we measure it from the ability to provide them with enough solid tools to allow each to go elsewhere, the perspective changes completely.
Perhaps Bach succeeded as a musical father because his children did not become Bach.
That is, for a parent, a much more difficult success to endure than it seems.
Leopold Mozart, that is when the prodigy child becomes an adult
With the Mozarts, this becomes even more delicate.
Leopold was not the caricature of the master father that some frizzy tales delivered to the popular imagination.
He was a musician, theorist, violinist, teacher, skilled organizer, man of culture. He led Wolfgang and Nannerl, organized very long and tiring trips across Europe, led contacts, concerts and opportunities. The Mozarteum Foundation describes it, with good reasons, also as a loving father, as well as teaching, and as an extraordinary promoter of the talent of children.
Without Leopold, the child Mozart that Europe knew probably would not have existed in the same way.
The problem comes when the child is no longer a child.
In 1781 Wolfgang is located in Vienna.
He wants to be independent.
He wants to build his career.
He wants to make decisions that his father doesn't always approve.
The letters between the two are an extraordinary document because they do not tell a simple rebellion, but something much more human: affection and need of autonomy can occupy the same page at the same time. The letters of that period, today preserved and made accessible by the Digital Mozart Edition, testify how intensely Wolfgang continues to turn to his father even while trying to emancipate from his decision-making sphere.
Perhaps this is one of the great misunderstandings between generations.
The autonomy of the child is sometimes perceived as a decrease in love.
But I'm not the same.
Getting away from our judgment doesn't necessarily mean getting away from us.
Wolfgang must withdraw at least part of his father's authority to become the Mozart we listen to today.
And here the question becomes uncomfortable:
when did education really do its job?
When does a son know how to do what we taught him?
Or when you have enough tools to start doing what we wouldn't recommend?
Clara Wieck: When training a talent risks becoming possessed
The story of Clara Wieck shows the point where this tension can become painful.
Friedrich Wieck built his daughter’s musical education with great rigour.
Clara became one of the most extraordinary pianists of the nineteenth century.
But when Robert Schumann entered his life, his father strongly opposed the relationship and marriage. In 1836, he went to ban meetings; in 1837 he rejected Schumann's proposal; Clara and Robert finally had to turn to the court to obtain permission to marry, which occurred in 1840.
It is a story in which we must avoid retrospective simplifications.
But it contains a very current distinction.
Helping build a capacity does not grant possession of the person who owns it.
A parent can teach the piano.
You can't always decide who should sit next to the pianist.
And it is precisely here that the poor Geppetto, if we allow us to invite him for some page in the nineteenth musical, would have something to learn.
The artisan is responsible for the object he builds.
The parent, however, must prepare for the most paradoxical responsibility:
progressively make its authority useless.
Not his love.
Not his presence.
Not your connection.
Your authority.
And then back to the squares
The boys who come down today on the street are not of course all right for the simple fact of being young.
Youth does not confer infallibility.
If so, humanity would solve many problems simply waiting for the generational replacement.
Neither every slogan deserves to be approved, nor any form of protest can be justified. The violence recorded in some manifestations remain violence and as such should be called.
But there is an opposite error, equally convenient.
Consider juvenile dissent only a form of collective rudeness.
Say, they don't know.
They don't understand.
They're manipulated.
They'll see when they grow up.
It is the way every adult generation risks turning, without realizing it, into Geppetto with the plank in hand.
Because of course adults have experience.
Of course the boys are wrong.
Of course they need limits.
But an educational relationship in which only one of the two subjects can have something to teach each other is a relationship destined, sooner or later, to become deaf.
On October 21, in the rain, nearly two thousand students crossed San Severo asking for more school and more future, talking about costs, education and prospects. Three days later, in Perugia, other boys chose an even more essential formula:
Listen to us.
Before you decide whether they are right, that request deserves to be understood.
Because listening is not equivalent to approving.
This is perhaps the most important lesson that music could impart to public life.
An orchestra conductor listens to a horn even when that horn was wrong.
The master of music listens to the error precisely because it must understand its nature.
Listening does not suspend judgment forever.
I do. preceding.
And it's very different.
Dissonance is not wrong music
Here the musical theory offers an even more beautiful metaphor.
For centuries the history of Western harmony has also been the history of dissonance.
A dissonance creates tension.
In the traditional counterpoint it is prepared, controlled, resolved according to certain rules.
Then the rules change.
Monteverdi expands its expressive force.
Bach builds counterpoint tensions of unheard of complexity.
Beethoven delays resolutions, builds up energy, makes instability part of the form.
Wagner brings harmonic suspension to consequences that seem indefinitely tonal rest.
The twentieth century finally comes to wonder whether dissonance really has to apologize every time to exist.
What does this mean?
That a musical culture also grows by changing what it considers tolerable.
A dissonance is not necessarily a wrong note.
It is an unstable relationship between sounds.
And instability may require transformation.
In families we often make such confusion.
A son introduces a dissonance.
He doesn't want what we wanted.
He doesn't think like us.
Background.
Contradict.
Raise your voice.
The first temptation is solve.
Return immediately to the consonance.
Put everything back.
But music teaches us that a resolution arrived too soon can be very trivial.
Sometimes you have to stay for a few lines inside the tension.
Understand what's going on.
Hear where that voice wants to go.
Not all dissonances must be eliminated. Some should be heard long enough to reveal the form they are preparing.
Geppetto already had music. More than one.
Here. Pinocchio meets music not only as a metaphor.
For generations of Italians the Geppetto di Nino Manfredi, in the television screen of Luigi Comencini of 1972, also has a musical voice: that of Fiorenzo Carpi.
Carpi was one of the great artisans of Italian stage music, a pupil of Giorgio Federico Ghedini, able to make convivere popular memory, melodic immediacy and a harmonious writing much more refined than the apparent simplicity let intuire. The Rai remembers The Adventures of Pinocchio among the leaders of his television production and emphasizes that ability to transform melodic materials accessible in harmoniously deep structures.
It's not a secondary detail.
Carpi includes an essential thing of Geppetto:
his fatherhood comes from shortcoming.
Before he's a father, he's one man.
It also constructs Pinocchio because it wants a presence.
And suddenly the parent-child relationship reveals an area of which we speak little.
We say that parents give life to their children.
And it's true.
But the children, coming, give a new life to their parents.
They change the rhythm of the days.
They change priorities, fears, times, languages.
They introduce a new time.
Geppetto thinks he gives shape to wood.
You still don't think that piece of wood is about to give a different shape to him.
From Rossini to Lucio Dalla: a theme passes by father to son
Years later, Enzo D’Alò and Lucio Dalla do an even more fascinating operation.
D’Alò told in 2026 that, building with Dalla the theme of Geppetto for his Pinocchio, they departed from the incipit of Cinderella by Gioachino Rossini, "Once there was a king", also a tribute to the interest of Collodi for Rossini.
Let's think.
Rossini.
Collodes.
Dalla.
Geppetto.
A 19th century musical phrase passes through different eras, languages and sensibilities and recompare transformed into a work of our time.
It is difficult to imagine a better metaphor than generation.
The theme comes inherited.
But it is not kept under glass.
It is deformed, slowed, recontextualized, listened through other ears.
In music we consider it natural.
No one would accuse Brahms of betraying Beethoven because he did not write Beethoven's Decima.
No one blames Mozart for not being left Johann Christian Bach.
No one would want Carl Philipp Emanuel to have written all his life fugues in his paternal style.
In fact, we call history of music this wonderful succession of faithful betrayals.
Every generation receives.
Every generation changes.
Every generation loses something.
Every generation adds something.
Then why, when this same law enters our homes, does it become so difficult to accept it?
Perhaps children are variations
The shape of the change could offer the most delicate metaphor.
A theme is presented.
Then he comes back.
But every time something changes.
The rhythm.
The log.
The shade.
Accompanying her.
The meter.
The character.
In the great musical variations, prodigy consists precisely in this: at some point the theme can become almost unrecognizable, yet it continues mysteriously to be present.
Let's think about Goldberg variations.
O Diabetes by Beethoven.
What remains of the initial material after the composer has gone through all the possibilities?
Not a copy.
Genealogy.
Maybe children look more like variations than replicas.
They bring us something.
A gesture.
An inflection.
A way of fear.
Some stubbornness.
Even errors we hoped we had not transmitted and recognised with that particular joy granted only to family genetics.
But all this comes into new combinations.
And it's right that it is.
Because if a variation repeats the theme without changing it, it would not be a variation.
It would be another performance.
A child is not a new performance of the parents' lives.
It is another composition.
The day Pinocchio stops being ours
But there is something even more difficult.
Geppetto must not only accept that Pinocchio is different from him.
You must accept that, at some point, Pinocchio may exist without him.
And this is perhaps the most painful part of parenting.
When a child is born, dependence is total.
Then a very slow subtraction begins.
Eat alone.
Walk.
Go to school.
Choose your friends.
Close a door.
He's taking a train.
He falls in love.
Go away.
The growth of a child is, given by the parent, a succession of small losses necessary.
Love must continually give up part of its power to not become captive.
It's terrible.
And it's great.
The parent really manages in his own task just when the person he protected becomes able to live without that protection.
A director might understand.
Because he too, after the trials, must carry out a small act of trust.
The concert cannot stop the orchestra every three bars.
He can't fix it.
He can't explain.
Raise the wand.
Then let what has been prepared happen.
Education contains something like that.
Prepare someone for the moment when we can't interrupt the music to tell them how the next line should play.
The true opposite of love is not disobedience
Perhaps, then, we read Pinocchio too long focusing on the wrong transformation.
We wait for the moment when the puppet becomes a child.
Like that was the final prize.
But the most interesting transformation could be another.
At first Geppetto has something he thinks he can build.
He finally has someone who learned to choose.
Not always well.
Not without mistakes.
Not without pain.
But choosing.
And perhaps becoming human means precisely this.
Don't be perfect.
Become a responsible for your voice.
This is where the squares of these days, without having to turn Pinocchio into a political manifesto, return to our history.
The boys who protest ask adults to be considered interlocutors of the world in which they will have to live.
We can tell them not.
We may challenge their analysis.
We may demand respectful forms of protest of people and things.
In fact, we have to do this when necessary.
But first you need something.
Feel the second voice.
Because the true opposite of love is not disobedience.
It is indifference.
And it's hard not to think about that sign:
«Listen to us, don't ignore us».
Maybe Geppetto should lay the planer
Two hundred years after Collodi, we can then return for a moment in the shop.
Geppetto is still there.
On the counter there is a piece of wood.
He owns the tools.
He knows how to use them.
He's experienced.
He knows the job.
And for this reason he is convinced that his task is to give a form.
He does not yet know that this will be the last time everything will depend only on his hands.
A voice will soon appear.
Then a will.
Then a conflict.
Then an escape.
Then the pain.
Then the return.
The son will change.
And the father.
Perhaps this is the secret Collodi had hidden in a book that we continue stubbornly to give to children.
Children are not the works of parents.
We're not their authors.
We don't own the final.
We can deliver a theme.
We can teach time.
We can show how important it is not to enter too early and not to stop playing at the first difficulty.
We can teach that some dissonances hurt and that every freedom brings with it a responsibility.
We can even indicate, when needed, the shade.
But then the time comes when a second voice must begin.
And it may not be what we imagined.
He could sing louder.
It could change.
It could challenge the theme.
He could even go out on the street with a sign in his hand.
The temptation will be to call her atonement.
Music suggests a more difficult possibility.
Listen again.
Because a different note is not necessarily a wrong note.
And a dissonance is not always something to silence.
Sometimes it is the exact point where music, if we have enough courage not to interrupt, is looking for a new path.
Geppetto had taken a piece of wood thinking of building a son.
Perhaps his great adventure begins when he discovers that a son is not built.
He's coming.
It runs sometimes.
It protects itself until it is necessary.
He contradicts himself, even.
But above all we listen.
Until the day when the thing happens that every parent, in secret, desires and fears at the same instant:
the voice that for years has sought its intonation finally finds it.
And he no longer needs to sing in unison with ours.
He found his melody.
At that point the task of Geppetto is not to resume the plan.
It is to do what every good musician can be infinitely harder than playing.
Shut up for a moment.
And listen.
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