Università Roma Tre

Fairytale Paths: the magical and marvellous tale from the origins to the present day

The fairy tale is only apparently aimed exclusively at a child audience: instead, it conveys values and messages important to the community and constitutes an underground presence in literature from its origins, eventually making its "official" appearance in the mid-sixteenth century. The course will follow the fairy tale in prose and verse from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, in a path that ranges from blending with other literary genres (such as short stories and chivalric poems) to the autonomous form and from anonymous tales to author's fairy tales.

Syllabus for attending students

Essays supplied by the professor and downloadable from Teams/Moodle or available from the photocopy shop in front of the Department of Studi Umanistici:
- C. Stromboli, L’invenzione della fiaba, in Le forme brevi della narrativa, a cura di Elisabetta Menetti, Roma, Carocci, 2019, pp. 81-106
- D. Pirovano, Introduzione a G. Straparola, Le piacevoli notti, Roma, Salerno
- M. Rak, Introduzione a G. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, Milano, Garzanti
- I. Calvino, Introduzione a Le fiabe italiane
- M. Lavagetto, Dal buio delle notti invernali
Handouts with excerpts from: Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron; Fiore di leggende, a cura di Ezio Levi; Francesco Cieco da Ferrara, Mambriano; Francesco Straparola, Le piacevoli notti; Giovan Battista Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti; Carlo Collodi, La storia di un burattino; Luigi Capuana; Guido Gozzano; Piero Calamandrei; Antonio Baldini; Tommaso Landolfi; Italo Calvino

Syllabus for not-attendig students

Non-attending students are required to add to the syllabus one of their choice of the following books:
Sarah Cruso, Guida alla lettura di Italo Calvino Fiabe Italiane, Roma, Carocci, 2007
Claudio Marazzini, Le fiabe, Roma, Carocci, 2004