Giambattista Basile

Stories from the Pentamerone Giambattista Basile

We are proud to publish the first Neapolitan/English dual-language book, making Neapolitan accessible to a broader public.

Neapolitan was the national language of the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies before the unification of Italy, and it is still spoken in most of southern Italy. This dual-language book makes this language so easy to understand that anyone can sample it.

It includes the original seventeenth-century Neapolitan text of twelve stories of the Pentamerone with the nineteenth-century English translation on facing pages; anyone who is familiar with a romance language should be able to understand the Neapolitan.

The Pentamerone was the first collection of fairy tales, written two centuries before the Grimm brothers published their famous collection. This book contains the earliest known versions of the stories we know as Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel, plus ten other tales that are equally charming.

George Cruikshank was the most popular Victorian book illustrator, loved for his illustrations of the works of Dickens and of many other authors.

"This collection was for a long time the best and richest that had been found by any nation. Not only were the traditions at that time more complete in themselves, but the author had a special talent for collecting them, and besides that an intimate knowledge of the dialect. ... the tone, at least in the Neapolitan tales, is perfectly caught...."

= Wilhelm Grimm