A self-made millionaire who drew inspiration from the story of Pinocchio has bought a vast, derelict villa in the Tuscan town of Collodi — where the wooden puppet’s tale was set — to house a museum in its honour.
Federico Bertola plans to turn the Villa Garzoni, a vast Baroque mansion built in the early 17th century and now classified as a national monument, into a ”museum for dreams”.
He has already invested almost â,¬5-million simply to restore the vast facade and roof of the villa, which was owned until 2000 by the Countess Gardi, who lived modestly in a few rooms while the rain poured through holes in the roof and the paper peeled in hundreds of empty rooms around her.
The villa’s garden, overgrown for decades, has been restored and opened to the public. Bertola hopes to complete the restoration and open a museum in the town, which already attracts Pinocchio-loving pilgrims.
The story is widely believed to have been set in Collodi, the town from which the author, the journalist Carlo Lorenzini, took his name. Lorenzini’s mother worked at the Villa Garzoni and he is believed to have known the area well.
”Dreams are hidden in books. And for me the big book of dreams was Pinocchio,” Bertola (58) told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
He described how when he visited the Villa Garzoni two years ago, he realised he wanted to make it a tribute to the fact that dreams can come true, as they did in his and many Italians’ lives as they turned from peasants into rich industrialists over the past half century.
”Sometimes dreams come out of the books and become reality … I was a farmworker and a ploughman, with only elementary school in my pocket, and I managed to make my dreams come true, just as the little wooden puppet did,” he said.
He grew up in a village called Pecorara, near Piacenza, working in the fields with his seven siblings from the age of 10.
”We worked hard, but we never had enough money,” said Bertola. ”So at 16 I decided to leave and go and make my fortune in Milan.”
Bertola survived mishaps and crooks, ending up today the owner of an industrial construction firm with a turnover of â,¬120-million per year.
As a young man he read Pinocchio over and over again. Besides telling a moral tale about the effect of lies, the story describes the simple life of Geppetto, the carpenter who dreams of having his own child and eventually makes himself a wooden one which comes to life.
A Pinocchio theme park at the bottom of the villa’s garden already has lifesize statues of Pinocchio characters that draw thousands of tourists every year. – Guardian Unlimited Â