"When I was little - a long, long time ago - I read a book called Pinocchio, or the Adventures of a Wooden Doll (a wooden doll in Italian is Buratino). I often told my friends, boys and girls, the fascinating adventures of Buratino. But since the book was lost, I told it differently each time, inventing adventures that were not in the book at all. Now, many, many years later, I remembered my old friend Buratino and decided to tell you, girls and boys, the extraordinary story of this little wooden man." Alexey Tolstoy
