Italian Folktales Quotes

“Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination, a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already suspected—folktales are real.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“For two years I have lived in woodlands and enchanted castles, torn between contemplation and action: on the one hand hoping to catch a glimpse of the face of the beautiful creature of mystery who, each night, lies down beside her knight; on the other, having to choose between the cloak of invisibility or the magical foot, feather, or claw that could metamorphose me into an animal.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“These stories differ but they tell of a precarious love that unites two incompatible worlds, and of a love tested by absence; stories of unknowable lovers who unite only in the moment in which they are lost to one another.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“continuous quiver of love runs through Italian folklore. In speaking of the Sicilian tales, I mentioned the popularity of the Cupid and Psyche type found not only in Sicily but also in Tuscany and more or less everywhere.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“Calabrian storytelling exhibits a rich, colorful, complex imagination, but within it the logic of the plot is often lost, leaving only the unraveling of the enchantment.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“She is always ready to bring to life feminine characters who are active, enterprising, and courageous, in contrast to the traditional concept of the Sicilian woman as a passive and withdrawn creature. (This strikes me as a personal, conscious choice.) She passes completely over what I should say was the dominant element in the majority of Sicilian tales: amorous longing, a predilection for the theme of love as exemplified in the lost husband or wife motif, so widespread in Mediterranean folklore and dating back to the oldest written example, the Hellenistic tale of Amor and Psyche told in Apuleius’ Metamorphosis (second century A.D.) and repeated through the ages in hundreds and hundreds of stories about encounters and separations, mysterious bridegrooms from the nether regions, invisible brides, and horse- or serpent-kings who turn into handsome young men at night.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“Messia, like a typical Sicilian storyteller, fills her narrative with color, nature, objects; she conjures up magic, but frequently bases it on realism, on a picture of the condition of the common people; hence her imaginative language, but a language firmly rooted in commonsensical speech and sayings.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“Pitrè did in folklore what Verga had done in literature; he was the first folklorist to transcribe not only traditional motifs or linguistic usages, but the inner poetry of the stories.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“The folktale must be re-created each time. At the core of the narrative is the storyteller, a prominent figure in every village or hamlet, who has his or her own style and appeal. And it is through this individual that the timeless folktale is linked with the world of its listeners and with history.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it”—in other words, its value consists in what is woven and rewoven into it.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“My work had two objectives: the presentation of every type of folktale, the existence of which is documented in Italian dialects; and the representation of all regions of Italy.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“There must be fidelity to a goal and purity of heart, values fundamental to salvation and triumph. There must also be beauty, a sign of grace that can be masked by the humble, ugly guise of a frog; and above all, there must be present the infinite possibilities of mutation, the unifying element in everything: men, beasts, plants, things.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“Taken all together, they offer, in their oft-repeated and constantly varying examinations of human vicissitudes, a general explanation of life preserved in the slow ripening of rustic consciences; these folk stories are the catalog of the potential destinies of men and women, especially for that stage in life when destiny is formed, i.e., youth, beginning with birth, which itself often foreshadows the future; then the departure from home, and, finally, through the trials of growing up, the attainment of maturity and the proof of one’s humanity.”
― Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

“L'uomo contento non aveva camicia.”
― Italo Calvino, Fiabe italiane