Page:Crane Italian Popular Tales.djvu/18

xiv afterwards the wife of the Italian general, La Racine. There are but two other collections of Italian stories by foreigners: Miss Busk's Folk-Lore of Rome, and the anonymous Tuscan Fairy Tales recently published.

The number of stories published, in German and English, is about twice as many as those published in Italian before Pitrè's collection, being over four hundred. Pitrè contains more than all the previous Italian publications together, embracing over three hundred tales, etc., besides those previously published by him in periodicals and elsewhere. Since Pitrè's collection, the three works of Comparetti, Visentini, and Nerucci, have added one hundred and eighty tales, not to speak of wedding publications, containing from one to five stories. It is, of course, impossible to examine separately all these collections,—we will mention briefly the most important. To Imbriani is due the first collection of tales taken down from the mouths of the people and compared with previously published Italian popular tales. In 1871 appeared his Novellaja fiorentina, and in the following year the Novellaja milanese. These two have been combined, and published as a second edition of the Novellaja fiorentina, containing fifty Florentine and forty-five Milanese tales, besides a number of stories from Straparola, the Pentamerone, and the Italian novelists, given by way of illustration. The stories are accompanied by copious references to the rest of Italy, and Liebrecht's references to other European parallels. It is an admirable work, but one on which we have drawn but seldom, restricting ourselves to the stories in the various dialects as much as possible. The Milanese stories are in general very poor versions of the typical tales, being distorted and fragmentary. In 1873 Dr. Giuseppe Pitrè, of Palermo, well known for his collection of popular Sicilian songs, published three specimens of a collection of Sicilian popular tales, and two years later gave to the world his admirable work, Fiabe, Novelle e Racconti, forming vols. IV.–VII. of the Biblioteca delle Tradizioni populari Siciliane per cura di Giuseppe Pitrè. It is not, however, numerically