The Pentamerone

Basile’s collection, Lo cunto de li cunti (1634; “The Story of Stories”), was published posthumously under the anagrammatic pseudonym Gian Alesio Abbattutis and referred to by its first editor as Il pentamerone (for pénte, the Greek word for five) because of the similarity of its framework to…

…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 White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “The Maiden in the Tower.” A later French collection, Charles Perrault’s Contes…