ROME — His likeness is everywhere, beaming impishly from the covers of books, the pages of magazines and the posters at countless bus stops and street corners. His name is on just about everyone's lips, but there is no unanimity of opinion about him.
All across Italy, a mischievous, mendacious marionette named Pinocchio rules.
With the imminent release here of a new, live-action movie of "Pinocchio" by the Italian superstar Roberto Benigni, Italians are in a kind of Pinocchio swoon, attended by a degree of Hollywood-style hoopla and synergistic merchandising that no homegrown movie has previously spawned.
"There has never before been this level of saturation for an Italian film," said Claudio Trionfera, a spokesman for Medusa Film, the company distributing "Pinocchio" in Italy, where it opens today on about 900 screens, a national record.
That means latex Pinocchio noses and Pinocchio backpacks, along with the requisite Pinocchio dolls.
But this being Italy, where debate and melodramatic overstatement rank just behind soccer as the national sports, it also means that Pinocchio is being deconstructed, pressed into political service and even feminized.
"I heard everyone talking about Pinocchio for the last few months and I thought, 'Why must a piece of wood be male?' " said Vittoria Hazel, author of "Pinocchia," a book published here last week.
It gives Pinocchio a soul mate, exploring the passion between puppets with names that end in different vowels.
"In Collodi's book, there are all these closed closets," she said, referring to the writer Carlo Collodi's original version in 1883. "In my book, Pinocchia helps Pinocchio to open those closets and see different worlds."
"The culture of mass marketing has arrived here, too," said Giorgio De Rienzo, a newspaper literary critic and professed Pinocchio savant.
De Rienzo, in a recent interview, called the Pinocchio fable "one of the few fairy tales in a culture without fairy tales. It's characteristically Italian — a story about the search for liberty but also for order — very much like 19th-century Italy."
"Pinocchio," he said, "is living on the line between order and disorder."