Giambattista Basile was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

, courtier

Courtier

A courtier is a person who is often in attendance at the court of a king or other royal personage. Historically the court was the centre of government as well as the residence of the monarch, and social and political life were often completely mixed together...

, and fairy tale

Fairy tale

A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...

 collector.

Biography

Born to a Neapolitan middle-class family, Basile was, during his career, a courtier and soldier to various Italian princes, including the doge of Venice

Doge of Venice

The Doge of Venice , often mistranslated Duke was the chief magistrate and leader of the Most Serene Republic of Venice for over a thousand years. Doges of Venice were elected for life by the city-state's aristocracy. Commonly the person selected as Doge was the shrewdest elder in the city...

. According to Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade...

 he was born in 1575, while other sources have February 1566. In Venice he began to write poetry. Later he returned to Naples to serve as a courtier under the patronage of Don Marino II Caracciolo, prince of Avellino

Avellino

Avellino is a town and comune, capital of the province of Avellino in the Campania region of southern Italy. It is situated in a plain surrounded by mountains 42 km north-east of Naples and is an important hub on the road from Salerno to Benevento.-History:Before the Roman conquest, the...

, to whom he dedicated his idyll L’Aretusa (1618). By the time of his death he had reached the rank of "count" Conte di Torrone.

Basile's earliest known literary production is from 1604 in the form of a preface to the Vaiasseide of his friend the Neapolitan writer Giulio Cesare Cortese

Giulio Cesare Cortese

Giulio Cesare Cortese was an Italian author and poet.-Life:Born to a well-to-do family, nothing is known of Cortese's early life, though it is thought that he was a schoolmate of Giambattista Basile. Receiving a degree in law, he tried life as a courtier in Spain and Florence, without any great...

. The following year his villanella

Villanella

In music, a villanella is a form of light Italian secular vocal music which originated in Italy just before the middle of the 16th century...

 Smorza crudel amore was set to music and in 1608 he publish his poem Il Pianto della Vergine.

He is chiefly remembered for writing the collection of Neapolitan fairy tale

Fairy tale

A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...

s titled Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille

Pentamerone

The Pentamerone is a seventeenth-century fairy tale collection by Italian poet and courtier Giambattista Basile.-Background:...

(Neapolitan

Neapolitan language

Neapolitan is the language of the city and region of Naples , and Campania. On October 14, 2008 a law by the Region of Campania stated that the Neapolitan language had to be protected....

 for "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones"), also known as Il Pentamerone published posthumously in two volumes by his sister Adriana in Naples, Italy in 1634 and 1636 under the pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 Gian Alesio Abbatutis. It later became known as the Pentamerone. Although neglected for some time, the work received a great deal of attention after the Brothers Grimm

Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm , Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm , were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular...

 praised it highly as the first national collection of fairy tales. Many of these fairy tales are the oldest known variants in existence. They include the earliest known versions of "Rapunzel" and "Cinderella".

External links and resources

• "La vita di Giambattista Basile" (in Italian)
• SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages: Il Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile
• Illustrations by Warwick Goble
  Warwick Goble
  Warwick Goble was an illustrator of children's books. He specialized in Japanese and Indian themes.Goble was born in Dalston, north London, the son of a commercial traveller, and educated and trained at the City of London School and the Westminster School of Art...
  
  
• Illustrations by George Cruikshank
  George Cruikshank
  George Cruikshank was a British caricaturist and book illustrator, praised as the "modern Hogarth" during his life. His book illustrations for his friend Charles Dickens, and many other authors, reached an international audience.-Early life:Cruikshank was born in London...
  
  
• Professor S. Cicciotti's page about G. B. Basile (in Italian)
• Online text of some stories, in English (from Taylor translation)
• From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's "Lo cunto de li cunti" and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale, Nancy L. Canepa (Wayne State University Press, 1999)
• Giambattista Basile’s “The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones,” Translated by Nancy L. Canepa, Illustrated by Carmelo Lettere, Foreword by Jack Zipes (Wayne State University Press, 2007)