Giovanni Francesco Straparola

Giovanni Francesco "Gianfrancesco" Straparola (c. 1480 – c. 1557) was an Italian writer and fairy tale collector from Caravaggio, Italy. He has been termed the progenitor of the literary form of the fairy tale in Europe.^[1] Charles Perrault borrowed most of his stories from Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile.

While his given name is likely to have been "Giovanni Francesco", the last name of "Straparola" is not plausible. It is not typical of a family name of that time and place, and the literal meaning of it, "babbler", seems a likely nickname for a writer.^[2]

Straparola's main work is two-volume collection Le piacevoli notti (published in English as The Nights of Straparola or The Facetious Nights of Straparola), with 75 stories. Modelled on Decamerone, it has participants of a 13-night party in the island of Murano, near Venice, tell each other stories that vary from bawdy to fantastic.^[3] It contains the first known written versions of many fairy tales.^[4]

Among the tales included were:

The Pig King
Costantino Fortunato, the oldest known variant of Puss-in-Boots
Ancilotto, King of Provino, the oldest known variant of The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird
Biancabella and the Snake
Maestro Lattantio and His Apprentice Dionigi
Guerrino and the Savage Man, the oldest known variant of Iron John^[5]
Fortunio, the earliest European appearance of a story about killing or injuring someone while attempting to shoo away a fly (Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1586)
Costanza / Costanzo

Venice was the first place in Europe where the book-buying public included considerable numbers of literate artisans. This accounts for the predominance in Straparola's tales of stories involving social rise.^[6]

References

^ Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, p 841, ISBN 0-393-97636-X
^ W. G. Waters, "The Mysterious Giovan Francesco Straparola", Jack Zipes, ed., The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, p 877, ISBN 0-393-97636-X
^ Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, p 841, ISBN 0-393-97636-X
^ Steven Swann Jones, The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1995, ISBN 0-8057-0950-9, p38
^ Paul Delarue, The Borzoi Book of French Folk-Tales, p 384, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York 1956
^ See Ruth Bottigheimer: Fairy tales, old wives and printing presses. History Today, 31 December 2003. Retrieved 3 March 2011. Subscription required.

External links

SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages: The Facetious Nights of Straparola, an English translation of many tales

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