Italian Folktales (3 page)

I drew very little on local legends concerning place origins or customs or historical records; this is a field entirely different from that of the folktale: the narratives are short, undeveloped, and their anthologies, with very few exceptions, do not reproduce the speech of the people; they only evoke it in a nostalgic, romantic style: in short, it was material I found unusable.

As for Italian dialects, I have taken all those that make up the Italian linguistic area, but not all those in Italy as a country. Thus I dealt with folktales from the French coast of Nice, whose dialect is closer to the Ligurian than to the Provençal, and passed over those from the Italian Aosta valley where a French dialect is spoken: I included some of the Venetian dialects of Jugoslav Dalmatia, and none from the German-speaking South Tyrol province of Italy. I made an exception for the small settlements of Greekspeaking sections of Calabria, two of whose folktales I included (since their narrative folklore is well integrated with that of the rest of Calabria; in any case, I am happy to have them in the book).

In parentheses at the end of each folktale in the book is the name of a locality or region. In no instance does it signify that the folktale in question originated in that particular area. Folktales are the same the world over. To say “from where” a folktale comes makes little sense; thus, scholars of the “Finnish” or historical-geographic school who seek to determine the zone of origin of each type of folktale come up with rather dubious results, placing them anywhere between Asia and Europe. But international circulation of common tales does not exclude their diversity, which is expressed, according to an Italian scholar, “through the choice or rejection of certain motifs, the preference for certain kinds, the creation of particular characters, the atmosphere suffusing the narration, the stylistic traits that reflect a formal, defined culture.” Folktales are labeled “Italian” insofar as they are narrated by the people of Italy, tales that have come into our narrative folklore via the oral tradition; but we also classify them as Venetian, Tuscan, Sicilian. Since the folktale, regardless of its origin, tends to absorb something of the place where it is narrated—a landscape, a custom, a moral outlook, or else merely a very faint accent or flavor of that locality—the degree to which a tale is imbued with that Venetian, Tuscan, or Sicilian something is what led me to choose it.

The notes at the end of the volume account for the name of the locality I have assigned to each story, and they also list the versions I read in other Italian dialects. So it will be quite clear that the designation “Monferrato” or “Marche” or “Terra d'Otranto” does not mean that the folktale itself had its origin in Monferrato, Marche, or Terra d'Otranto; but that as I recorded that particular tale I kept foremost in mind the version of it from one of those regions. Because of the various texts at my disposal, this particular one struck me as not only the most beautiful or the richest or the most skillfully narrated, but also as the one which, rooted in its native heath, had drawn from it the most pith, thereby becoming typical of Monferrato, Marche, or Otranto.

It must be noted that with many of the first folklorists, the urge to collect and publish was stimulated by the “comparatist” passion peculiar to the literary culture of the period, in which similarity rather than diversity was stressed, and when evidence of the universal diffusion of a motif rather than the distinction of a particular place, time, and narrative personality was emphasized. The geographic designations of my book are, in certain cases indisputable (in many of the Sicilian tales, for instance), while in others they will appear arbitrary, justified solely by the bibliographical reference in the note.

In all this I was guided by the Tuscan proverb dear to Nerucci: “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it”—in other words, its value consists in what is woven and rewoven into it. I too have thought of myself as a link in the anonymous chain without end by which folktales are handed down, links that are never merely instruments or passive transmitters, but—and here the proverb meets Benedetto Croce's theory about popular poetry—its real “authors.”

 

The Folklore Anthologies

 

The work of documentation of Italian narrative done over nearly a century by folklorists has a very uneven geographical distribution. For some regions, I found a mine lode of material; for others, almost nothing. There are full, good collections for two regions in particular: Tuscany and Sicily.

For Sicily my most important source is Giuseppe Pitrè's
Fiabe, novelle e racconti popolari Siciliani
(
Sicilian Fables, Stories and Popular Tales
, 1875). It consists of four volumes containing 300 narratives classified according to type, written in all the dialects of Sicily: it is a scholarly work, painstakingly documented, replete with footnotes of “variants and collations” and lexical comparatist notes.

Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916) was a medical doctor dedicated to the study of folklore, who had a large team of collectors working for him.

The secret of Pitrè's work is that it gets us away from the abstract notion of “people” talking; instead, we come into contact with narrators having distinct personalities, who are identified by name, age, occupation. This makes it possible to uncover through the strata of timeless and faceless stories and through crude stereotyped expressions, traces of a personal world of more sensitive imagination, whose inner rhythm, passion, and hope are expressed through the tone of the narrator.

Pitrè's collection dates from 1875; in 1881, Verga wrote
I Malavoglia
(
The House by the Medlar Tree
). Contemporaneously, two Sicilians, the novelist and the scholar, listened, each with a different purpose, to the fishermen and gossips, so as to transcribe their speech. We may compare the ideal catalog of voices, proverbs, and customs which each of them sought to put together, the novelist coordinating it with his own inner lyrical and choral rhythm, the folklorist with a carefully labeled museum which can be inspected in the twenty-five volumes of the
Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane
(1871–1913), the twenty-four years of his journal,
Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari
, 1882–1906 (“Archives for the Study of Popular Traditions” ), the sixteen volumes of the series,
Curiosità popolari tradizionali
(“Popular Traditional Oddities”), and even in his collection of folk art and craftsmanship now housed in the Pitrè Museum in Palermo. Pitrè did in folklore what Verga had done in literature; he was the first folklorist to transcribe not only traditional motifs or linguistic usages, but the inner poetry of the stories.

With the advent of Pitrè, the folklore movement began taking into account, in the very existence of a storytelling tradition, the part played by poetic creativity. This is entirely different from the field of folksong, where the song is forever fixed by its lines and rhymes, anonymously repeated in its choruses and with a very limited possible range of individual variations. The folktale must be re-created each time. At the core of the narrative is the storyteller, a prominent figure in every village or hamlet, who has his or her own style and appeal. And it is through this individual that the timeless folktale is linked with the world of its listeners and with history.

The protagonist of Pitrè's collection is an illiterate old woman, Agatuzza Messia, a former domestic of Pitrè's, a quilt maker in Borgo (a section of Palermo) living at 8 Largo Celso Nero. She is the narrator for a number of Pitrè's best tales and I have freely chosen among them (see stories 148 through 158). This is how Pitrè, in the preface to his anthology, describes his model narrator:

 

She is far from beautiful, but is glib and eloquent; she has an appealing way of speaking, which makes one aware of her extraordinary memory and talent. Messia is in her seventies, is a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother; as a little girl she heard stories from her grandmother, whose own mother had told them, having herself heard countless stories from one of her grandfathers. She had a good memory so never forgot them. There are women who hear hundreds of stories and never remember one; there are others who remember them but haven't the knack of storytelling. Her friends in Borgo thought her a born storyteller; the more she talked, the more they wanted to listen.

Messia can't read, but she knows lots of things others don't, and talks about them so picturesquely that one cannot help but appreciate her. I call my readers' attention to this picturesqueness of speech. If the setting of the story is aboard a ship due to sail, she speaks, apparently unconsciously, with nautical terms and turns of phrase characteristic of sailors or seafaring people. If the heroine of a story turns up penniless and woebegone at the house of a baker, Messia's language adapts itself so well to that situation that one can see her kneading the dough and baking the bread—which in Palermo is done only by professional bakers. No need to mention domestic situations, for this is where Messia is in her element; inevitably, for a woman who, like all her neighbors, has brought up her children and the children of her children “to serve the home and the Lord,” as they say.

Messia saw me come into the world and held me in her arms; this is how I heard from her lips the many beautiful stories that bear her imprint. She repeated to the young man the tales she had told the child thirty years before; nor has her narration lost one whit of its original purity, ease and grace.

 

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 as
Testa di Bufala
(“Buffalo Head”) which simply clamors for ethnological interpretation. There were also tales that appear strangely modern and “invented,” like
La novellina delle scimmie
(“The Little Tale of the Monkeys”) but a great many of the stories have the same themes and plots as popular poems (going back to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) and as the
Arabian Nights
; these (with only the settings transposed) are so faithful to the French eighteenth-century translation by Galland (allowing for an adaptation to suit Western taste) as to exclude the possibility of influences stemming from long ago, via who knows what oral paths from the Orient. These were unquestionably directly plucked from literature and transposed into folklore quite recently. Thus, when the widowed Luisa Ginanni repeats from beginning to end the plot of Boccaccio's
Andreuccio da Perugia
, I believe that it derives not from the popular tradition that was the source of Boccaccio's story, but from a direct version in dialect of the most picaresque story in the
Decameron
.