Italy
ItalyItaly can pride itself on having the earliest and one of the richest collections of literary fairy tales in Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti. The seminal experimentations with the fairy tale as an independent literary genre in the Renaissance and baroque periods on the part of Basile and Straparola did not, however, provide the impetus for the blossoming of a subsequent fairy‐tale ‘vogue’, as was the case in France of the 17th and 18th centuries. Even Basile's Lo cunto, though recognized by scholars for centuries as an artistic and folkloric masterpiece, never achieved the status of beloved national treasure that the collections of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, or Aleksandr Afanasyev did. Although Italy has abounded in important fairy‐tale...
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