Pentamerón : El cuento de los cuentos

Few readers know that some of the world's most beautiful fables, from "Cinderella" to "Puss in Boots," before ending up in the pages of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, where we all discovered them as children, were collected from oral traditions by the Italian Giambattista Basile, who published them at the beginning of the 17th century in the Neapolitan Baroque dialect. The Pentameron was described by the great Benedetto Croce as "the oldest, richest, and most artistic of all books of popular fables," and by Italo Calvino as "the dream of a Neapolitan Shakespeare." Even today, when most of its pages form part of our shared mythology, this gentle and brutal, tender and plebeian, wise and popular book remains a nearly unknown masterpiece.