Italian Popular Tales is a collection of Italian folk and fairy tales translated into English from oral tradition. It gathers magic tales, animal stories, and humorous or moral tales from various regions, offering a window into Italian storytelling and comparative folklore. Listen for its lively variety and its place in European folk-tale study.
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Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected. This book has two types of notes. Footnotes are in the text and are indicated by a letter. These have been moved to the end of the appropriate paragraph. Endnotes are indicated by a number, and the notes for all the chapters are at the end of the stories. ITALIAN POPULAR TALES BY THOMAS FREDERICK CRANE, A. M. PROFESSOR OF THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES IN CORNELL UNIVERSITY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
Copyright, 1885,
BΏ THOMAS FREDERICK CRANE.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
To
GIUSEPPE PITRÈ.
PREFACE.
The growing interest in the popular tales of Europe has led me to believe that a selection from those of Italy would be entertaining to the general reader, and valuable to the student of comparative folklore.
The stories which, with but few exceptions, are here presented for the first time to the English reader, have been translated from recent
Italian collections, and are given exactly as they were taken down from the mouths of the people, and it is in this sense, belonging to the people, that the word popular is used in the title of this work. I have occasionally changed the present to the past tense, and slightly
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