Italian Folk Tales

"As a communist, Calvino himself realised I think that the kind of realist literature he had been writing didn’t really appeal very much to the people he wanted to reach – Pier Paolo Pasolino made the same move in his trilogy of films that included one on the Canterbury Tales . The literature of working people, the people who the communists wanted to include in culture rather than separate from it, was steeped in the exuberant fairy tale, and Calvino wanted to see that culture recognised. But when he looked around he couldn’t see a book that did that and so he decided to do it himself. He writes in his introduction about how he became so completely and deeply absorbed by it all – he says at one point that he would have given the whole of Proust just to find another variation on the tale of the donkey that shat gold. He collected the tales from the ethnographers around the country, who had already gathered them up – including a brilliant Sicilian, Giuseppe Pitrè, who was a doctor in Palermo in the nineteenth-century, who collected them from his patients. He’s a very important figure in all of this. In Italy the ethnographers had been very, very busy right through the 18th and 19th centuries, gathering up these fragments in pursuit of the idea of italianità . They were finding out about the many streams feeding this extraordinarily rich and varied culture. And so Calvino went to all the local libraries collecting them, and one of the reasons he decided to translate them all into his own prose was because there were just so many of them. This has all been very much in my mind because I’ve been involved in this project in Palermo – a refugee storytelling project for ‘minorenni’, aged l8 and under. We’ve been trying to create a space for refugees to tell stories from their own culture, or to invent stories out of their own culture rather than tell stories of their own often tragic circumstances. It is called Stories in Transit and we are currently building the website, www.storiesintransit.com , where we’ll archive the work – the plays and songs etc of the young people. I see the telling of stories as an opportunity for mischief and defiance, dreams and laughter – hope against hope."