Most traditional stories were past down from generation to generation in an oral tradition which made for well paced and entertaining stories. Sadly they are often retold in the hands of someone with a pace that is comparable to a three legged horse in a race, and sadly not as entertaining. (I know some of you are thinking I'm awful for that right now and are taking a moment to think the worst of me.) Thankfully, Italo Calvino lent his hand to the collecting and retelling of Italian folktales and so all the stories in this book have his excellent gift for entertaining telling. This helps at times where the stories run the risk of sounding otherwise repetitive, which happens often in folktales. Most often collections of folk tales are either slim volumes of a few stories that have been continuously recycled or you have to buy several books in a series to obtain the complete collection by a certain editor. This book weighs in at 800 pages and so you can sit rooted in the same spot for days while reading all of the stories. I don't actually recommend doing that. Here is how I propose you read stories from the book: Prepare a pot of whatever warm beverage tickles your fancy, (this can be anything from mulled cider to tea to coffee), find the most comfortable place in the house, (if you are pet owner this will be the place that your cat or dog is likely already occupying in this case you must displace them), make sure that the only noise that may disrupt you is from the local wildlife outside your window, if you have other people to read with or to gather them as well only make sure they don't take your comfy spot, open the book, read the introduction, (well being realistic you will nobly try and read it for two sentences, then you will skim for a couple of paragraphs and then you will give up), and begin with the first story. It's okay to take the occasional break from reading the tales however I recommend that you do not give it up for more than a few minutes at a time! If you have your doubts about how good this collection might be I'll have you know that this book is so well liked that I have had it stolen from me, twice. So please go out and invest the money into your own copy of the book and leave mine to my bookshelf!
Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino is a marvelous collection of stories akin to Grimms Fairy Tales, or Charles Parrault’s Tales of Mother Goose. As the preface explains, Italy lacked, until this book, a ‘comprehensive book of Italian folk tales, one that would be representative of the entire country and intended for popular consumption as well.’ Calvino must have expended an immense effort, working through 19th century source materials, to compile these stories, but none of this scholarly toil is recorded in the book except for brief mention in the preface. The book includes no information about where and when each story appeared, what variations exist, echoes in neighboring countries, none of that. This is not a work of anthropology or literary history but, as the title says, a collection of folk tales. What distinguishes the book isn’t scholarly embellishment but the fact that the stories are collected, assembled, edited, and arranged by a master story teller.Folk tales are 33% plot, 33% conflict, and 33% theme. Little attention goes to setting (once upon a time in a land far away) or character, (there was a barber who had three sons). Vaguely described settings and stereotyped characters help make these stories understandable to anyone at any time or place. Where plot is preeminent, who better to hold the tiller than Calvino, a master of plot. Consider his If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, a novel in which the narrator engages the reader regarding the plot several times and still succeeds in drawing attention back to what happens next in the story with the intensity of a spy thriller. His sure hand of story-telling was precisely the hand needed to arrange these folk stories.The collection begins with ‘Whoever Loses His Temper Loses the Bet’ and ends with ‘The Lame Devil,’ and delivers in total 53 nuggets of narrative, involving giants and fairies, monkeys and ducks, kings and hunchbacks. Enjoy.
What do You think about Italian Folktales (1992)?
Calvino es un autor que me gusta. Su ensayo de por qué leer a los clásicos brindó siempre geniales discusiones en mis clases. Corazón Jaguar siempre ocupará un lugar especial en mi corazón de alcachofa. Peeeero descubrir esta joya fue extraordinario.Leerlo con un vaso de leche y galletitas, disfrutar cada una de las historias, volverse niño no preguntar, no decir eso no me lo creo, no cuestionar. Disfrutar solamente todas estas historias de hadas, príncipes, brujas, dragones y magia tanta. Volverse niño y no preguntar. Creer, creerlo todo. Volverse niño.
—Sylvia
200 folktales ... I feel like I have accomplished a major reading project.Reading folktales/fairytales, it's fun to see some of the similarities in European stories and start to pick up not only national but regional idiosyncrasies. This extensive collection of Italian tales not only has similarities to some very familiar stories but some also have threads of Arabic tales and Roman myths. This is my first experience of Italian folktales outside of Roman mythology, so one of the things I don't really understand is the fascination with the Kings and Queens of Spain or Portugal -- they were mentioned in a great number of stories -- but this connection was never really explained. I think my favorites were the St. Peter stories, in which he is the raucous petty Everyman, which are very humorous.My only suggestion for this kind of anthology is that the organization of the stories could have been better -- by region or group similar stories together with their regional variations. There is a section at the end of Author's notes in which Calvino explains where he found each story or added some additional information. For me, these would have been more helpful to be placed by each tale instead of a section at the end of the book. "And tbere they lived a life happy and long, But nothing did they ever give me for my song."
—Anna
This is a masterful collection of Italian Folktales, where the reader is lured into a world of flux, of metamorphoses, where kings and peasants, tricksters and saints, and a whole zoology* of extraordinary animals, plants and fish wend their way through the landscape and history of the Italian nation.Italian Folktales (Fiabe Italiane) is a collection of 200 folktales, collated from various regions around Italy, and from the works of a whole army of collectors, folklorists, ethnologists etc., making use of an extensive collection of work compiled over the centuries. Italo Calvino started this undertaking in 1954 (published 1956), with the intention of emulating The Brothers Grimm, and producing a collection of tales that would be popular amongst the general reading public. Within these pages we follow a nations collective psyche, yield to the joyous imagination and complexity of the human experience.http://parrishlantern.blogspot.com/20...
—Parrish Lantern
