Italian Folktales

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ITALIAN FOLKTALES ill. Rosso Fiorentino (1494-1540). Angelic musician.

These Italian tales are selected from many collections.

Giovanni Francesco Straparola

The impulse of collecting folk tales that was shown by the Grimms was not confined to Germany and their centuries time. In fact, the earliest literary collection of stories with a popular origin was made in the 1500s by an Italian, Giovan Francesco Straparola. Straparola (literally: babbler) looks like the writer's nickname. He came from Caravaggio, a town halfway between Milan and Cremona.
In 1550 Straparola published at Venice a collection of stories in the style of the Decameron. His collection "was received with the greatest favour. It passed through sixteen editions in twenty years, was translated into French and often printed in that language, and before the end of the century was turned into German." Straparola's tales were largely borrowed, yet, "to him belongs the honor of having introduced the Fairy Tale into modern European literature," informs Thomas Crane (see below) in the introduction to his collection.

Giambattista Basile

About a century after Straparola the celebrated Pentamerone appeared at Naples in 1637. Its author, Giambattista Basile, is but little better known than Straparola. He spent his youth in Crete, became known to the Venetians, and roamed much over Italy, and finally returned to Naples. He died nearby in 1632. His Pentamerone is a collection of fifty stories in the Neapolitan dialect. Crane writes in his introduction: "Basile's work enjoyed the greatest popularity in Italy, and was translated into Italian and into the dialect of Bologna."
It is also fit to mention that famous fairy tales of the French Perrault and Madame d'Alnou are of Italian origin.
In 1869 de Gubernatis published the Novelline di Santo Stefano, which contained thirty-five stories. This was the forerunner of many collections from the various provinces of Italy. Popular Italian tales do not differ much from those of the rest of Europe. The same story is found, with minor variations, all over Italy, Crane informs.

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (1923-85) was a much-read Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. In 1956 he published 200 Italian folktales as Fiabe Italiane. It was the first comprehensive collection of Italian fairy tales. He aimed at producing a popular collection of Italian fairy tales for the general reader and emulating the Grimm Brothers - "a collection of Italian folktales to take its rightful place alongside the great anthologies of foreign folklore," as he writes in his introduction to the book. In his book he used used existing collections of folklorists, adn could draw on vast numbers tales that had been recorded, also in various dialects. He set out to assemble "a readable master collection" on this basis, plunging into the stock of available material. With differing versions of tales at his disposal, he seems intent on choosing those who "struck me as not only the most beautiful or the richest or the most skillfully narrated", but also those who seemed (subjectively) rooted in their various Italian regions.
Calvino also found that "A continuous quiver of love runs through Italian folklore", and that "eroticism of tales that we now consider as a part of children's literature . . . was not intended for any particular age level". He came to think the very essence of the Italian folktale was "unparalleled grace, wit, and unity of design" too. He also got confirmed a conviction: that folk stories are a catalog of the potential destinies of men and women. In the real world too "There must be fidelity to a goal and purity of heart," he found.
In his book, Calvino noted the source of each tale he included, and altered tales to make them more readable.

Good points by Anne MacDonell (Gleanings)

In Italy fairy-tales are loved not only by the children. Round the Italian peasant fireside, they still sit in the winter evenings after their work is done - men (some of them, at least), women and children, and tell and listen, and listen and tell, for hours together.
As to the personages of the stories, the giants and wizards and witches can hold their own with those of any land. But Italian fairies have a habit of taking on quite ordinary shapes. A market-woman or a milkmaid you pass by thus makes travelling in Italy very interesting. You never know when you may meet a fairy.
And if all the tales be true, there is no end to the fairies' gratitude for good services. Sometimes they even reward you when you do them a good turn without meaning it.
Wise travellers in Italy have got the happiness-giving, old fairy-tales by heart, and therefore never pull long faces, nor give themselves airs when they meet the people of the country. For maybe the chambermaid may be a fairy, or the coachman, or the old woman by the church door. So they think - perhaps and perhaps not.

Annotated bibliography

Anderton, Isabella. Tuscan Folk-Lore and Sketches, together with Some Other Papers. London: A. Fairbairns. 1905.

Stories were told to her by various peasants during a summer stay amid the Tuscan Apennines above Pistoia. She fell ill while on a vacation there, and was tended by an old peasant woman who spent hours by her bedside and by her hammock in the woods, knitting and telling her stories.

Basile, Giambattista. The Pentamerone. Tr. Benedetto Croce. 2 vols. London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1932.

Basile became in time count, Conte di Torrone. He is remembered for writing the collection of fairy tales titled Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille in Neapolitan. The title means "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones". The title Pentamerone was first used in the 1674 edition. In it, fifty stories are related over the course of five days. The style is Baroque.
He recorded and adapted tales that are believed to have been orally transmitted around Crete and Venice. In his collection we find earlier versions of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel. The French Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers acknowledge they used his collection, and the Grimms praised it highly.
Many of these fairy tales are the oldest known variants that exist.

Boccachio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Tr. James Macmullen Rigg. 2 Vols. London: Privately printed for the Navarre Society, 1903.

A collection of 100 medieval novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, finished in 1353. A a group of seven women and three men who flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa in the countryside for two weeks, and tell one another tales, one story each every day.
Many later writers borrowed from the book, including Jonathan Swift, Shakespeare, John Keats, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and many others. Chaucer too is said to have drawn inspiration from this work, but there is reason to think that he and Bocchacchio rather used a common French source.
Boccaccio, in turn, had borrowed the plots of almost all of his stories. He consulted French, Italian, and Latin sources, and some of the tales originate in far-off lands - India, Persia, Spain, and other places. And some of the Boccachio tales were centuries old. Also, many of the characters Bocchacho wrote about, actually lived or had lived. There are also some characters that most likely are invented by Boccachio.
The work has a Renaissance flair. Tales from it are recognised in the International Folktale Catalogue too - about half a dozen of them are listed in it.

Calvino, Italo. Italian Folktales. Tr. George Martin. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

200 Italian tales, published in 1956 by Calvino as Fiabe Italiane. He intended to publish as many Italian folktales for the general reader as the Brothers Grimm had done with German tales by their edited collection of Household tales. Calvino altered tales to make them more readable, and at times changed the name of heroines too.

Crane, Thomas Frederick. Italian Popular Tales. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1885.

Thomas Frederick Crane (1844-1927) was one of the leading folklorists of the 1800s and a founder of the Journal of American Folklore. He is particularly noted for his collection of Italian tales. It his preface to it he writes among other things that, "I have occasionally changed the present to the past tense, and slightly condensed by the omission of tiresome repetitions; but otherwise my versions follow the original closely, too closely perhaps in the case of the Sicilian tales . . . Other condensations are indicated by brackets."
Crane aimed at a tolerably complete collection of Italian popular tales for the general reader, but ended up with "a small selection" of "typical stories". There are over a hundred stories in the text, and many added stories in his footnotes.

Macdonell, Anne. The Italian Fairy Book. London: Unwin, 1911.

A nice and charming book.

Steedman, Amy. Legends and Stories of Italy for Children. London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1909 (?).

These legends and tales speak for innocent harmony and of how to persevere without blame, to make it pay. One is to guard oneself against evil people along the road. Men and women who come safely through misfortune, may get deserved good fortune.

Straparola, Giovanni Francesco. The Nights of Straparola. Tr. William George Waters. 2 Vols. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1894.

Giovanni Francesco (c. 1480 - c. 1557) was an Italian writer and fairy tale collector. Charles Perrault borrowed most of his stories from Giovanni Francesco and Giambattista Basile. The Nights of Straparola (or The Facetious Nights of Straparola) contain 75 stories, including the earliest known version of Strong John.

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