Fiabe Italiane = Italian Folktales, Italo CalvinoItalian Folktales, is a collection of 200 Italian folktales, published in 1956, by Italo Calvino. Calvino began the project in 1954, influenced by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale. List of tales:001 - Dauntless Little John vannino senza paura.002 - The Man Wreathed in Seaweed.003 - The Ship with Three Decks.004 - The Man Who Came Out Only at Night005 - And Seven!006 - Body-without-Soul.007 - Money Can Do Everything.008 - The Little Shep...

Italo Calvino has compiled a truly delightful collection of 200 traditional Italian folktales.Calvino is the perfect choice to put these folktales into writing. His prose is vibrant, as always.This volume was undoubtedly a labor of love for Calvino. These stories are playful and full of joy. You will find yourself smiling ear-to-ear while reading many of them.With 200 folktales, Calvino covers a lot of ground. All different types of folktales are represented in this volume. There is something he...

I was just taking a little stroll on a rainbow. I'll be right down. One word review : Charming! Italo Calvino sets out here to salvage the treasure trove of popular wisdom, his inspiration in the monumental works of the likes of Brothers Grimm, Perrault, Andersen or Afanasiev. The result is this collection of very Italian and very amusing folklore collected from dusty library shelves by previous ethnographers and polished up by Calvino. He adds his personal touch of wry humour and subversive m

There is an endless fascination to fairy and folk tales. As a child, I remember listening to them at my great-aunt’s knee: she was a great storyteller, and often embellished and modified tales, so that cruel and sad parts were left out. The same tales were restored to their original form when told by my mother, who was adamant that a child should not be shielded from cruelties and horror. Needless to say, I preferred my great-aunt.Later on, I came to read and love the Classics Junior series of c...

Molti re e regineIn a way, I guess I was expecting more from the 200 tales in this collection, which Calvino collected from throughout Italia in the 1950s.Many common threads braid these tales. A few seem duplicative of others, with minor variations; and some mirror prominent tales from Grimms collection. I will write down the threads I can recall while I'm on my vacation beginning tomorrow. Collectively, the list will undoubtedly prove very humorous.I do know a lot more now about the common str...

As a tiny child, I read this an enormous number of times -- I remember bringing it in to my kindergarten class to show to my teacher (who, certainly, had doubts that I'd actually read it. Psh. (Yes. I am hugely pretentious.))Regardless. I've read bits and pieces of it again and again over the years, and it remains one of the most delightful books I know. There is no reason for this not to be a favorite book for kids -- it's exciting, full of an enormous number (200!) of vivid stories perfect in

Wow! It's hard to even know where to begin reviewing this collection. I started reading it in 2015 for a group read, and finished about a third. I set it aside meaning to return to it, but never did. At the start of this year, I decided I would read 10 fairy tales from it between every print book I finished. And 7 months later, I'm finished! I enjoyed the process so much I'm going to start doing that with another fairy tale collection.And I literally read it to pieces. Both the front and back co...

My mother gave me this book when I was seven years old. She got it from a salesman who was smart enough to convince her that the book was perfect for a seven years old, even though it was a book of more than a thousand pages, and an expensive one, with an heavy binding that made it difficult for a little boy to handle. Well, this was probably the best gift I ever had. I read the book countless times, totally fascinated by the weirdness of the characters and by the gruesomeness of the stories, el...

Useful reference material. To be admired for the approach and scholarship. Otherwise bland.

Jo Walton's short take from Dec, 2021:"Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino (1956)This is a collection of folk and fairy tales collected by Calvino and others from all over Italy and retold by Calvino. They all have provenance, and it’s fascinating to see the varieties of stories popular in different places. It’s a huge volume; I’ve been reading this for months, and enjoying the process. These stories are different from Grimm and Perrault but also similar to them… There’s nothing here as strange as

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 an...

Calvino wanted to be Italy's Brothers Grimm. Not in the sense of collecting the tales, which folklorists had been doing, but creating a popular collection. This is the result, down to the 200 tales. He notes that he also, like the Grimms, spruced up the tales. Unlike them, he put in end notes about what tales he combined, and what little details he added. (He went by the language and not by the country's borders.)It's a wide variety, including some religious legends and animal fables and tales a...

Well, Neil Gaiman gave it five stars...and Wikipedia had this intriguing insight: "Over a seven-year period, Calvino wrote three realist novels, The White Schooner (1947–1949), Youth in Turin (1950–1951), and The Queen's Necklace (1952–54), but all were deemed defective.[28] During the eighteen months it took to complete I giovani del Po (Youth in Turin), he made an important self-discovery: "I began doing what came most naturally to me – that is, following the memory of the things I had loved b...

I wish my parents had read this aloud to me when I was little- perhaps one of the best collections of fairy tales I've ever read. Calvino finds a very strong narrative voice while still managing to balance his own typical style and the speaking style of those who told him the stories in the first place. My favorite is a similar story to little red riding hood except with an ogre..."Grandmother, what a big neck you have...""I've always worn such heavy jeweled necklaces my dear.""Grandmother, what...

Too many of these stories followed the same pattern: poor character is having a bad time > something semi-magical happens > character gains wealth or nobility.For a writer with communist sympathies and an anarchist father, Calvino sure seems to (re-)tell a lot of stories that glorify kings, marriage, and wealth.

My Grandmother, from Italy, would tell my brother and I Giufa stories every night. We loved them. I have become the teller of Giufa stories. I was convinced that my Grandmother had made all these stories up about this poor farmboy, and his mother. When my eldest son was in 1st Grade, he asked me one night after a Giufa story, "Is Giufa real, Dad." Wanting my son to believe these stories to get the full impact, I replied, "Of course."Then my son said, "Then tomorrow when we go to the library we c...

More Italian fairy tales than you can shake a stick at.Fairy tales told in clear, straightforward language. Ones that you've heard (and probably associate with the Brothers Grimm), ones that you haven't heard, and ones where you're like, "Wait...that's not quite the way it's supposed to go." Reading this collection, it's suddenly no surprise why folklorists love to classify tales like this according to theme. Being able to track tales across countries and centuries would be a hoot. If you've rea...

200 folktales ... I feel like I have completed 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 reall...

These fairy tales were very enjoyable. Not too surprisingly, there was some repetition - different regions of Italy having various versions of basically the same story - but that didn't bother me. It was interesting to see a few tales that were clearly variations of Homer!

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., mak...

This is a fun book with a whole lot (200) of cute and sometimes dark folktales. There are some great ones, like what has to be the basis for Beauty and the Beast. The writing is great as it always is with Calvino.The problem is that there are wayyyyy too many. 800 pages of folktales is too long. After 50 or so they can get repetitive and formulaic. I ended up skipping a bunch of stories. Because of this I couldn't rationalize 3 stars, even though the enjoyment level was definitely there.This wou...

When you read a book every day for two months, you develop a relationship with the book. That’s what happened with Italian Folktales. I felt like I grew to know Italy through both space and time through the hundreds of stories in this book, stories from every part of Italy, over seven hundred pages of stories. Many had familiar elements; I read stories that reminded me of Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, among others. Most had at least some of the classic characteristics of fa...

3.5 stars. Best read in tiny chunks; most of the individual stories are a lot of fun (albeit somewhat disorienting from our post-post-modern perspective on plot and characterization. Also, Why is it the third brother and the youngest daughter that’s always successful? Why are so many parents ready to sacrifice their kids (but not vice versa)? Why are so many husbands not able to recognize their wives (and vice versa)? Why is there a king on every street corner?). Read in larger chunks they can a...

What a treasure this collection is! The perfect bedtime read: all the tales are quite short, 2-3 pgs, yet seem to encompass entire worlds and eras.If you want to understand how Calvino can say so much so wonderfully in such a short space, pick up his posthumous essay collection, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, and read the essay "Quickness." A delightful meditation on the art of storytelling.

Stories, told and retold, take on lives of their own as parts of the tale are dropped, other parts added, some things stressed and other things inverted. These folktales, gathered from all over Italy, provide incredible insight into how language reflects social mores and prejudice. An amazingly illuminating work. I suggest reading these tales in as rapid succession as possible to make all the threads that wind through the tales (tales where children lose hands, tales of magic food, tales with de...

Great, fun bedside read.

Highly uneven collection that I've been reading off and on the last year. It's a general favorite but it did now "wow" me as some of the Russian authors do.

It's not the cosmicomics :(

Some of these stories will seem vaguely familiar, which is part of the fun of folktales. The rest of the pleasures come from the sometimes gory, sometimes funny, and, occasionally, happy or satisfying, parts of this remarkably entertaining and weirdly meaningful panorama of multiple narrators making sense of their lives or just passing the lonely hours with a few laughs or thrills. The result is a masterpiece of storytelling at its finest.

When you have 800 pages of folk tales and fairy tales, even when you try reading a few a night, it eventually gets old, like eating mashed potatoes every night. A great majority of these stories are silly, nonsensical things, with a lot of repeating plot structures. Only a few reached an absurd level, or better yet, an absurd-symbolic level. I did get some inspiration from a few of the tales, and that's why I signed up.