Italian Folktales

Published in Italian in 1956 as Fiabe italiane, this collection presents two hundred tales chosen from regional Italian folklore and rewritten by Calvino in a single clear narrative voice. Kings, peasants, witches, talking animals, and cunning youngest children move through plots of quest, transformation, and just or comic revenge. Calvino draws on earlier collectors from Sicily, Tuscany, Venice, and the south, and he notes variants without burying the stories in apparatus. The book is an arranged national tale-hoard: a reader's anthology of popular Italian narrative, not a field transcription of any one dialect tradition.

Bound in colour image blocked cloth (Vol. Mid blue, Vol. Green. Textured vinyl-coated mid-blue paper slipcase.