ABSTRACT
The stories children have read for centuries, such as Phaedrus's fables, Ovid's myths and Aeneas's adventures, come from Italy. Later there were medieval Christian legends, collected by Jacopo da Varagine, and chivalrous romances. Then, from the sixteenth century onwards, story writers like Straparola with Le piacevoli notti [Pleasant Nights] or Giulio Cesare Croce with Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo [The Very Subtle Tricks of Bertoldo] took inspiration from popular oral sources, some of them probably meant for children. The sub-title of Lo cunto de li cunti, ovvero lo Trattenimiento de li peccerille [The Tale of the Tales, or How to Entertain Little Girls] (1634–1636), a collection of tales edited in Neapolitan dialect by Giambattista Basile stands out as the first work in which little girls play an important role. But, like Perrault's Fairy Tales, it was intended for adult readers. Other critics (Fanciulli and Monaci 1935) have seen in Domenico Soresi's Novelle piacevoli e istruttive [Instructive and Pleasant Tales] (1768) the first text written specifically for children. The date is meaningful (a few years after Emile) since it is without doubt thanks to the spread of liberating ideas that books intended expressly for children came into being in Italy. They are collections of passages: the childhoods of famous persons, heroic deeds taken from history, and tales (like those of the Venetians Gasparo and Carlo Gozzi, modelled on the Grimm brothers).
