A Great collection of fairy tales, made great mainly by the style. It has the kind of far out fantastic elements that lingered from folk traditions going back to the middle ages, the sort of thing where a magic box or fairy can do absolutely anything instantly and miraculously, like a genie's lamp or a Holy Grail, and most problems are solved by magical intervention.If you were to look at the book in terms of ideology, you might be mortified. If the book has an ideology it could be expressed as:...

Il Pentamerone, as it's otherwise called, is I think my favorite collection of fairy tales. Call me morbid, but I love the humor and absurdity of Basile's stories, unbound as they are from propriety and Christian morals. These tales include several of the darkest and most violent fables I've ever seen, and yet I've never before laughed so much reading a fairy tale collection. You can't help but laugh when so many ridiculous things occur, like a man assigning a bear to be his family physician and...

I read these tales in order to have a working knowledge of the origins of some fairy tales - these tales are often absurdly incomprehensible - but do appreciate the loads of footnotes. I collect and study old fairy tales, so this was a necessary read - but didn't enjoy it.

Back in these ages, when they wanted to describe something super beautiful or super ugly, they made sure they drilled the descriptions into your skull. These tales are not a forgiving bunch. If somebody is kinda ugly, they are ABOMINATIONS. If somebody is kind of pretty they are PULCHRITUDINOUS. While they don't use these words, they'll use hundreds of words that are like these and enable in and on.Just wanted to note that about this book.

This obscure and wonderful collection of fairytales is not, perhaps, quite as filthy as you might expect from something called Lo cunto de li cunti, but it's still full of bizarre and scatological delights. Written in the early 1600s – before the Grimms, before Perrault – it contains the first known versions of famous tales like Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, or Sleeping Beauty, all of them dramatically different from how they're told today, and throws in for good measure a host of more

This is a quite unique reading experience and an extraordinary translation from Nancy Canepa. It's hard to remember a book so packed with mad life and weird wisdom.

This has to be one of the most hilarious collection of fairy tales I have ever read. The story teller is always on point, crude, and honest. I really cannot compare this to any other collection of have read before. There is a lot of extra descriptions to read in the stories, particularly when the narrator goes on about what he really means by something ugly or gross, and it is funny. Just amazing!An entertaining read.

This is a brilliant and fantastical collection of early fairy tales. The framing story is really interesting and gives us almost an Arabian Nights set up to work within. Each story is a complete entity, and every one is worth reading. The style is light, informal and engaging... I am sure that this is thanks in part to the excellent translation, having read the notes at the start this has stuck as closely to the original as possible. A few of the attitudes expressed clash with modern sensibiliti...

I didn't make it through the introduction, because that first story is racist as fuck and, sure, it was originally written in the 1600s but like I cannot and I don't want to.The story is about a black slave girl, described as "that mass of dark flesh" who lies and takes the place of a good girl, and becomes the princess. I quit hard when the slave (she doesn't get a name) threatens to kill her baby because the prince was making eyes at the other girl:"If you no move from windowsill, me punch bel...

A tale told of five nights in which ten women present their own tales to the king and queen. Giambattista Basile's Pentamarone: Lo cunto de li cunti is structured as a frame story containing fifty tales told by ten women over five consecutive nights to a king and his villainous queen. This collection is regarded as the first collection in which all stories fit the category of "fairy tale". Later adapted by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, The Tale of Tales is a vastly underrated collecti...

Perhaps, the weirdest collection of fairy tales I've come across in my study of fairy tales. These were written in the seventeenth century, before bigger names like Grimm and Perrault. You can tell at times because most of these stories are early versions of best loved tales like Cinderella, Rapunzel Puss in Boots, and Sleeping Beauty. Unlike Grimm and Perrault, this isn't an anthology of fairy tales. This is a novel set up similar to Arabian Nights and Canterbury Tales. It's a story about telli...

Fifty fairy tales, told over five nights, from Italy over two centuries before the Brothers Grimm.These tales weren't exactly for the little ones, as the subtitle suggests. Lots of excrement, sex, and racism. And obscure references--jokes about Italian culture of the time--that you're constantly having to stop and look up.Not my favorite collection and not the easiest to read, but still interesting, especially seeing tales that were later picked up and censored by the Grimms.

Una de las colecciones de cuentos populares más antiguas de Europa, toda una joya. A veces el lenguaje de Basile es demasiado "Barroco" (él no se limitó a copiar los cuentos, usó un lenguaje más culto y literario), pero es una obra de gran belleza, con cuentos que se alejan de esa imagen de canciones y purpurina que nos ha vendido nuestra sociedad obsesa de lo políticamente correcto. Aquí encontramos joyas como "El mirto", "El cuento del ogro", "las dos tortitas" y "La vieja desollada" (genial e...

This was one of the more interesting fairy tale collections I have read.Collected in the early 1600s by Basile, this book has some of the oldest versions of some of the better-known fairy tales (e.g., Puss In Boots). But it also holds some very bizarre fairy tales I'd never read before. Many of them use plot devices familiar to any folklore buff—like the wicked stepmother, super-talented helpers, ogres of all kinds, enchanted beauties hidden in animal skins or fruit, hidden objects, and (of cour...

Collection presents early versions of Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and others. Very good. I really enjoyed the story about the king and the two old ladies. This is an adult collection with bawdy humor and a Cinderella who kills a step-mother.

A fantastic translation, with an informative introduction and very helpful footnotes. This is an excellent resource for the earliest Western versions of some of the most well-loved fairy tales.Canepa's work is especially welcome, since the last complete English translation was done by Sir Richard Burton in the late 19th century. While his version does tell all the tales, I've read that it is more of a freer translation, and it offers nothing in the way of context or notes. I have a copy of Burto...

literally j fairy tales w a sprinkle of misogyny and racism💖

I loved the movie, but oh, that book. It is a collection of Italian fairy tales from the early 1600's. They are gruesome, dark, ironic and reflect an outlook on a world that treated its people in a like manner. Justice is not always swift in these tales, but it is exacting. The evil, selfish and stupid get what's coming to them. The truly beautiful and the innocent are rewarded with treasure beyond imagining. These were court tales for people to amuse each other with while idling away the time

Pentamerone, or "The Tale of Tales". Obscure and fantastic 17th's century tales for adults that burst out of: proverbs, luscious sexual insinuations, absurd, lust, incestuous and pervert sexual fantasies, reviles, interesting story lines and moral precepts at the end of each story. As it is well known - those tales were formidable inspirations for brothers Grimm, Andersen and Perrault to accommodate its sexual and obscure content to a form that is (more or less) children-susceptible. Hence, such...

Interesting collection of stories, with flavors of both the West and the East (though, thank heaven, with fewer "May he live forevers" than the Arabian Nights). A notable difference from the Grimm collection was that most of the characters had names. I don't know if these are the collector Basile's contributions or a difference of culture. I enjoyed the author's aversion to just saying "The next day..." or "When the sun rose..." Instead we read "As soon as the Sun with the broom of its rays had