Most Popular Books by Giambattista Basile

As one of the oldest known fairy tale collections ever, Stories from the Pentamerone influenced several famous storytellers, including the Brothers Grimm stories. Known in the Italian as Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille (The Tale of Tales or Entertainment for Little Ones), its one of the most influential literature works in the fairy tale genre today.

Stories from the pentamerone presents a vibrant tapestry of imaginative tales that blend wonder, moral reflection, and the unpredictable workings of fortune. The collection opens with a royal household troubled by lingering sorrow, using this moment to introduce a world where enchantment and consequence shape every path. Through encounters with magical beings, shifting destinies, and trials that test perseverance, the stories highlight how desires often lead individuals into unexpected challenges that reveal inner strength or hidden folly. Early scenes establish a journey sparked by an unexpected burst of laughter and a curse that sends a young figure into a realm shaped by fairies, enchanted tasks, and the hope of restoring joy. These beginnings set the tone for a sequence of adventures that intertwine humor, danger, and wonder, emphasizing the delicate balance between choice and fate. With its rich storytelling style and vivid imagery, the collection invites readers into a landscape where actions carry weight, dreams unfold unpredictably, and the search for happiness becomes a transformative quest.

The first unabridged English translation taken directly from Basile''s monumental Lo cunto de li cunti (1634–1636), this edition is fully annotated and illustrated, with an extensive bibliography. The Tale of Tales, made up of forty-nine fairy tales within a fiftieth frame story, contains the earliest versions of celebrated stories like Rapunzel, All-Fur, Hansel and Gretel, The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. The tales are bawdy and irreverent but also tender and whimsical, acute in psychological characterization and encyclopedic in description. They are also evocative of marvelous worlds of fairy-tale unreality as well as of the everyday rituals of life in seventeenth-century Naples. Yet because the original is written in the nonstandard Neopolitan dialect of Italian—and was last translated fully into English in 1932—this important piece of Baroque literature has long been inaccessible to both the general public and most fairy-tale scholars. Giambattista Basile''s "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones" is a modern translation that preserves the distinctive character of Basile''s original. Working directly from the original Neopolitan version, translator Nancy L. Canepa takes pains to maintain the idiosyncratic tone of The Tale of Tales as well as the work''s unpredictable structure. This edition keeps the repetition, experimental syntax, and inventive metaphors of the original version intact, bringing Basile''s words directly to twenty-first-century readers for the first time. This volume is also fully annotated, so as to elucidate any unfamiliar cultural references alongside the text. Giambattista Basile''s "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones" is also lushly illustrated and includes a foreword, an introduction, an illustrator''s note, and a complete bibliography. The publication of The Tale of Tales marked not only a culmination of the interest in the popular culture and folk traditions of the Renaissance period but also the beginning of the era of the artful and sophisticated "authored" fairy tale that inspired and influenced later writers like Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Giambattista Basile''s "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones" offers an excellent point of departure for reflection about what constitutes Italian culture, as well as for discussion of the relevance that forms of early modern culture like fairy tales still hold for us today. This volume is vital reading for fairy-tale scholars and anyone interested in cultural history.

During the seventeenth century, the collection of ancient Italian fairy tales known as Il Pentamerone was first set down and published in Naples. Used as a source for the Brothers Grimm, among others, it includes the earliest printed accounts of Cinderella, Rapunzel, and other favorites.

First published in two volumes in 1634 and 1636, "The Pentamerone", or "The Tale of Tales", by the Italian poet Giambattista Basile is acknowledged as one of the first collections of fairy tales. Basile''s collection was written in the Neapolitan language, which is a Romance language spoken in parts of Southern Italy, and was published after his death under a pseudonym. Basile put these primarily oral stories into writing and many are the oldest known versions of these stories in existence. He preserved such tales such as Cinderella, Rapunzel, Puss in Boots, Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and many more for posterity. This work did not receive the attention it deserved until it was cited by the Brothers Grimm in the third edition of their "Grimm''s Fairy Tales" as the first national collection of fairy tales and this caused a significant increase in interest for "The Pentamerone". As a result, Basile''s work was translated into German in 1846 and English for the first time in 1847 bringing the tales to a wider audience. This timeless collection of some of the world''s most famous stories continues to delight and entertain audiences young and old. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and follows the complete translation by Richard F. Burton.

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