The Project Gutenberg eBook, Italian Popular Tales, by Thomas Frederick
Crane

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Title: Italian Popular Tales

Author: Thomas Frederick Crane

Release Date: November 26, 2007 [eBook #23634]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN POPULAR TALES***

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Transcriber's note:

Minor typographical errors have been corrected.

Carets (^) indicate a superscript letter.

This book has two types of notes. Footnotes are in the text and
are indicated by a letter. These have been moved to the end of
the appropriate paragraph. Endnotes are indicated by a number,
and the notes for all the chapters are at the end of the stories.

ITALIAN POPULAR TALES

by

THOMAS FREDERICK CRANE, A. M.

Professor of the Romance Languages
in Cornell University

Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge

Copyright, 1885,
by Thomas Frederick Crane.
All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

To

GIUSEPPE PITRE.

PREFACE.

The growing interest in the popular tales of Europe has led me to
believe that a selection from those of Italy would be entertaining to
the general reader, and valuable to the student of comparative
folk-lore.

The stories which, with but few exceptions, are here presented for the
first time to the English reader, have been translated from recent
Italian collections, and are given exactly as they were taken down from
the mouths of the people, and it is in this sense, belonging to the
people, that the word popular is used in the title of this work. I have
occasionally changed the present to the past tense, and slightly
condensed by the omission of tiresome repetitions;[A] but otherwise my
versions follow the original closely, too closely perhaps in the case of
the Sicilian tales, which, when recited, are very dramatic, but seem
disjointed a