SOURCE: “Italo Calvino and the Nature of Italian Folktales,” in Italica, Vol. 64, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 244–62.

In the following essay, Beckwith examines the sources of Calvino's Italian folklore.

A little over thirty years ago Italo Calvino set out to provide for Italy what the Grimms had given Germany, a national collection of folktales. After two years of research he published Fiabe italiane (1956), 200 tales gleaned from nineteenth-century collections in the various dialects of Italy and translated into Italian. Louis Brigante translated 50 of these into English as Italian Fables (1959) and Sylvia Mulcahy translated 24 of them as Italian Folk Tales (1975), but it was not till George Martin's translation of the complete work as Italian Folktales (1980) in the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library that it became the standard collection in English of Italian tales. Calvino and his reviewers generalize about the Volksgeist of Italy and how it differs from that of Northern...