Italian Folktales Read Online Free

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    Messia, like a typical Sicilian storyteller, fills her narrative with color, nature, objects; she conjures up magic, but frequently bases it on realism, on a picture of the condition of the common people; hence her imaginative language, but a language firmly rooted in commonsensical speech and sayings. She is always ready to bring to life feminine characters who are active, enterprising, and courageous, in contrast to the traditional concept of the Sicilian woman as a passive and withdrawn creature. (This strikes me as a personal, conscious choice.) She passes completely over what I should say was the dominant element in the majority of Sicilian tales: amorous longing, a predilection for the theme of love as exemplified in the lost husband or wife motif, so widespread in Mediterranean folklore and dating back to the oldest written example, the Hellenistic tale of
Amor and Psyche
told in Apuleius’
Metamorphosis
(second century A.D. ) and repeated through the ages in hundreds and hundreds of stories about encounters and separations, mysterious bridegrooms from the nether regions, invisible brides, and horse- or serpent-kings who turn into handsome young men at night. Or else the fragile, delicate genre that is neither myth, short story, nor ballad, epitomized by that sigh of melancholy, sensual joy,
La sorella del Conte
(“The Count’s Sister”).
    In contrast to the Sicilian folktale which unfolds in a somewhat limited gamut of themes and often from a realistic starting point (how many hungry families go out into the country looking for plants to make soup!), the Tuscan folktale proves a fertile ground for the most varied cultural influences. My favorite Tuscan source is Gherardo Nerucci’s
Sessanta novelle popolari Montanesi
, 1880 (
Sixty Popular Tales from Montale
—a village near Pistoia), written in an odd Tuscan vernacular. In one of these a certain Pietro di Canestrino, a laborer, told, in
La Regina Marmotta
(“The Sleeping Queen”), the most Ariosto-like tale to come from the mouth of a man of the people. The story is an uncertain byproduct of the sixteenth-century epic, not in its plot (which in its broad outline is reminiscent of a well-known folktale) nor in its fanciful geography (which also dates back to the ballads of chivalry) but in its manner of narrating, of creating magic through the wealth of descriptions of gardens and palaces (much more complete and literary in the original text than in my own highly abridged reconstruction, where I sought to avoid any appreciable divergence from the general tone of the present book). The original description of the queen’s palace even includes a list of famous beauties of the past, introduced as statues: . . . and these statues represented many famous women, alike in dress, but different in countenance, and they included Lucretia of Rome, Isabella of Ferrara, Elizabeth and Leonore of Mantua, Varisilla Veronese with her beautiful face and unusual features; the sixth, Diana of Regno Morese and Terra Luba, the most renowned for her beauty in Spain, France, Italy, England, and Austria, and whose royal blood was the purest . . . ” and so forth.
    The book of the sixty Montale stories appeared in 1880, when many of the most important Italian collections of folktales had already been published, but the lawyer Gherardo Nerucci (1828–1906, somewhat older than the other folklorists of the “scientific” generation) had begun collecting tales much earlier, in 1868. Many of the sixty stories were already in the anthologies of his colleagues; some of the most beautiful tales in the Imbriani and Comparetti collections are his. Nerucci was not concerned with comparatist storytelling (his interest in popular tales was
linguistic), but it
is plain that the Montale stories are based, often, on literary sources. To be sure, this village also produced its share of obscure and prehistoric tales, such