The Nights of Straparola

Straparola’s Piacevoli notti (1550–53; The Nights of Straparola) contains 75 novellas (short prose tales) that were later used as source material by William Shakespeare, Molière, and others. It drew from folk tradition and introduced into European literature some 20 fairy tales, among them what would eventually be known as…

…Italian collections such as Le piacevoli notti (1550, vol. 1; 1553, vol. 2; “The Pleasant Nights”) of Gianfrancesco Straparola and Il Pentamerone (1636; originally published [1634] in Neapolitan dialect as Lo cunto de li cunti) of Giambattista Basile contain reworkings in a highly literary style of such stories as “Snow…