Carlo Collodi

He fought for Italy, then had to explain the country to its children. Carlo Lorenzini of Florence ran a satirical paper the censors kept shutting, volunteered twice in the wars that unified the peninsula, wrote comedies, a parody novel, and sketches of Tuscan types. After unification he sat on the theatre board and, when the new kingdom needed schoolbooks, invented Giannettino — a rascal who teaches geography and civic manners by misbehaving. He also put Perrault into Italian. The puppet arrived late, in a children’s weekly, from a journalist already tired of sermons. Disney sanded him down. Collodi never did.