ABSTRACT
The people who were the slowest and most difficult to be persuaded about the unique if not extraordinary merits of Giuseppe Pitrè were not the illiterates, but the cultivated people. For some time it seemed to them that the good doctor of Palermo, also a folklorist, had lowered the dignity of scholarship, humiliating himself by collecting scattered little stories that formed the domestic and traditional lore of the Sicilian people…. But the determination, constancy, and seriousness of Pitrè's studies ended up by generating a unanimous appreciation that, perhaps because it was so slow and gradual, reached the university, where it seems that a new science of comparative psychology of popular customs and traditions was born. Due to Pitrè's merits it was worthy of assuming this high office.
