Italian Folktales

Calvino began the project in 1954, influenced by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale; his intention was to emulate the Straparola in producing a popular collection of Italian fairy tales for the general reader.

[2] He included extensive notes on his alterations to make the tales more readable and the logic of his selections, such as renaming the heroine of The Little Girl Sold with the Pears Perina rather than Margheritina to connect to the pears,[3] and selecting Bella Venezia as the Italian variant of Snow White because it featured robbers, rather than the variants containing dwarfs, which he suspected were imported from Germany.

[5] Reviewing the book in The New Republic, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: "Essentially this book is to Italian literature what the Grimms' collection is to German literature.

And its particular glory is that it was done not by a scholar-specialist but by a great writer of fiction... With absolute sureness of touch he selected, combined, rewove, reshaped so that each tale and the entire collection would show at its best, clear and strong, without obscurity or repetition.

He assumed his privilege without question, and fulfilled his responsibility magnificently.