Does an Italian equivalent of Grimms's Fairy Tales exist? Italo Calvino began his research into Italian folktales with that question in mind. When it became clear that there was no "readable master collection of Italian folktales which would be popular in every sense of the word," Calvino himself assumed the work of assembling one. It was a Herculean undertaking. Calvino collated, categorized, and compared "mountains of narratives." His work had two objectives, he tells us, the presentation of every type of folktale documented in Italian dialects and the representation of all regions of Italy. The "scientific" work, the direct transcription of folktales "from the mouths of the people," had already been done by several nineteenth century Italian folklorists. Calvino made his way through their anthologies, looking for the most unusual, beautiful, and original texts. These texts he then edited, enriched with variants, and translated into standard Italian from the various dialects in which they had been recorded. The end result is a collection of two hundred tales arranged in a geographical sequence. (p. 381)

[Calvino] is particularly struck by the many metamorphoses of woman and fruit and woman and tree in Italian folktales, and he points to the narrative power of the metaphorical link in which the image of the fruit evokes that of the woman. Often, however, it seems that the "precise rhythm" and "joyous logic" which he discerns in such stories of transformations are really the result of Calvino's own inventiveness. One of the most striking examples of his adaptation of a story in the direction of a more pronounced metaphorical symmetry is "The Little Girl Sold with the Pears."

In the traditional tale, a little girl named Margheritina is placed in the bottom of a basket of pears to make it look full, and delivered to the king's kitchen. Raised there she draws the favor of the king's son and the jealousy of the maid servants. Banished through their trickery, she returns with a witch's treasure, protected by magical props provided by the prince, whom she marries. Where the original tale seemed to put its emphasis on the power and constancy of love, Calvino's adaptation shifts the attention to the pear motif. He changes the child's name to Perina ("Little Pear") and he invents an episode in which the young girl receives the means for obtaining the treasure from a little old woman under a pear tree. Thus, when Calvino speaks of the hybrid nature of his edition, we must remember the more literary qualities the popular tales assume as they are recast by a contemporary letterato, an accomplished and self-conscious practitioner himself of the art of the fable.

Calvino makes some very interesting and suggestive remarks in his introduction about the nature of love, the imagery of cruelty, and the relation of the world of the king to that of the peasant in the Italian folktale. He doesn't, however, discuss one of the most interesting types of folktales represented in this collection, the stories about various saints or about Christ and the Apostles…. There is something very Italian about these wonderful sketches in which Christ is shown playing tricks on his Apostles and "splitting his sides laughing" when St. Peter's attempts at miracle-making backfire. The Mediterranean world has traditionally had a more relaxed relationship not only to its rulers and its legendary heroes, but also to its saints and to God himself. (pp. 381-82)