I had heard it so often positively asserted that modern Italy had no
popular mythology, and no contribution of special versions to offer to
the world's store of Traditionary Tales, that, while possessing every
opportunity, I was many years without venturing to set myself against
the prevailing opinion so far as to attempt putting it to the proof.
A certain humble friend, however, used time after time so to impress me
with the fancy that she had all the qualifications for being a valuable
repository of such lore if it only existed, that I was finally led to
examine her on the subject. She gave me a capital opportunity one day
when, during a visit to a bedridden cripple whom she nursed, she was
flapping the dust off the pictures and ornaments with a feather-brush
according to the Roman idea of dusting. 'I never do any dusting,'
she said the while, 'but I always think of Monsignor Delegato dusting
the altar of the holy house of Loreto. And now I think of it, he was
not called Monsignor Delegato, but Monsignor Commissario. But every
evening of my life while I was young and living at Loreto, I have
seen him dust the altar of the Santa Casa at 23 o'clock, [1] before
they shut up the church, saying a Salve Regina for the benefactors of
the spot.' If she was so familiar with Loreto, I concluded, and had
so noticed and remembered its customs, probably she was not ignorant
of its Legends either, and I commenced my inquisition at once.
I have not given her Legends of Loreto in the text because,
being tolerably familiar, they were among those which could best
be sacrificed to the exigencies of space. I gathered on that day,
however, one version of S. Giovanni Bocca d'oro, with two stories of
Padre Filippo: and her subsequent testimony concerning the crucifix
of Scirollo came in usefully (pp. 193, 195) in illustration of the
Legend of Pietro Bailliardo; but, what was precious to me above all,
I gained the proof and earnest that there was certainly a vein of
legendary lore underlying the classic soil of Rome, and that it only
remained to find the means of working it.
I first lazily set myself to hunt through the bookshops, new and old,
to find any sort of collection of traditionary tales ready made;
but only with the effect of establishing the fact that no Italian
Grimm had yet arisen to collect and organise them, and put them into
available shape. [2]
It is true the erudite and indefatigable Cesare Cantù has found time
in the midst of his more important labours to illustrate some few
remnants of mediæval customs and sayings yet lingering in the north
of Italy, in his 'Novelle Lombarde;' and he tells me that the Balio
Benvenuti, also of Milan, is bringing out another little volume about
Lombard customs; but even these have not approached the fairy tales,
and leave Central and Southern Italy altogether untouched. [3]
The nearest approach to the material of which I was in search was
afforded in the roughly printed rimed legends which itinerant venders
sell at the church doors on festa days. Among the collection I have
made of these, are many whose quaintness gives them special interest,
notwithstanding their baldness of style and diction; but the matter
which came to me first hand seemed to have the first claim to
publication; and I have, therefore, put these among my reserve for
a second series. [4]
No repository of Roman Folklore was to be found ready-formed. 'Who
among us,' writes Cesare Cantù in his preface to his 'Novelle
Lombarde,' 'knows anything about these matters? If they were the things
of Scotland or Touraine we should all have read them long ago in the
pages of Scott or Balzac. But here among us there are neither writers
who care to describe nor readers who take any interest in learning
the ways of our own country. People like to seem above giving their
attention to such homely matters, and only care for what they must
look at through a telescope.'
I was thus thrown back on my own powers of collecting, and found
the process, however fascinating where successful, much more uphill
work than it had promised to be at the outset. Legends, it is true,
there was less difficulty in obtaining. There might be some sense and
some moral in them, and I found people were not ashamed of knowing
them; but it long remained impossible to convince persons who had
even betrayed to me indications that they possessed what I wanted,
to own fully to a knowledge of bonâ fide Fairy Tales, or to believe
that I could be serious in wishing to listen to such childish nonsense.
'But suppose you had a child to amuse,' I would say at last, 'I am
sure you would sometimes tell it a marvellous story.'
'Ah, a creatura, [5] yes! But I haven't the face to tell such nonsense
to your signoria.'
'Never mind that, if I want to hear it. Imagine I am the creatura,
and tell me one of your tales. I want something about transformations,
fairy gifts, and marvels of all sorts.'
In some such way, after due precaution taken to convince me that
such things were only allowed a place in the memory for the sake of
amusing children, and not because anyone believed in them, one tale
after another would be suffered reluctantly to ooze out.
But you cannot make application for such wares to the first person
you meet. The class in which such lore is stored away is not indeed
so exclusive that introductions to it are a very difficult matter,
but introduction of some sort you must have; some claim for taking up
a person's time, where time is money; and some means of compensation
you must devise, the more difficult to invent where direct payment
would be an offence. Your modern Romans are very independent; I
cannot say whether the quality is more an inheritance from their
ancient forefathers, or adopted from the continental spread of
French revolutionary ideas of '93. True, they are singularly urbane
and deferential, but only so long as you are urbane and deferential
towards them. If you omit any of their peculiar forms of politeness,
they are suspicious of you, and scarcely know how to make allowance
for the well-meaning inexperience of a foreigner. If you want to learn
anything from them you must submit to become one of them. You must
converse first on the subject uppermost in their minds, from the price
of bread and meat to the latest change in the political atmosphere;
only when all is exhausted may you venture to come round to the matter
of which you are in search. Many, too, in whose memories such stories
have lain dormant since childhood, for more than half a century, have
not the power of recalling them in due form or order for narration
on abrupt application, but will yet bring them out unconsciously if
patiently led up to an appropriate starting point.
Nor is it every application, made with all precautions, that will be
successful. Often you must submit to be put off with the tantalising
experience that a person knew plenty of stories, but was quite
incapable of putting them into shape. This happened once with an
intelligent old lady from Siena, whom, after allowing her to indulge
her irony at my expense concerning my childishness in seeking such
things, I brought to confess that she had heard in her youth a strange
story of a cat which wore stivali di cacciatore (hunter's boots),
but she could not succeed in recalling a single incident of it;
and I was obliged to content myself with the information (no small
encouragement in the early days of my work, however!) that 'Puss in
Boots' had actually travelled to Tuscany.
At another time one would have to spend hours in listening to detached
incidents altogether lacking a thread to connect them, or stories
of which the point had been so completely lost that they could only
have been made available by means of a reconstruction too integral
to be honestly attempted. As, e.g., 'Oh yes! I know a story of an
enchantress who had a gown which made her invisible, and a pair
of boots which would carry her a thousand miles without walking,
but I quite forget what she did with them.' Or else it might be, 'I
knew a story of a king whose wife had been fatata (subjected to magic
influence), and maligned by her mother-in-law while the king was gone
to the wars; but that's all I remember, except that in the end the
queen was rehabilitated, and the mother-in-law punished'--incidents
of stories recurring in every collection, but tantalisingly lacking
all means of further particular identification with any. Sometimes,
too, it would be only a title that could be recalled, and nothing
more, as in the case of a certain 'Uccello Biverde,' [6] which I
have been several times assured is 'a most beautiful story,' but I
have never yet succeeded in meeting with any one who could supply the
narrative. I have further felt called sometimes to exercise a difficult
forbearance in withholding some specimens which at first promised to
afford singular instances of interchanged episodes, but which there
afterwards appeared reason to conclude were merely jumbled in the bad
memory of the narrator, and had, therefore, no individual interest,
but were rather calculated to mislead. [7]
One of my worst disappointments was the case of a very old woman, who,
I am assured, knows more of such things than anyone in the world, but
whom nothing can induce to repeat them now. She has grown so toothless
and tremulous and inconsecutive, that it is not easy to understand
her; but I think her arguments are not difficult to appreciate in
the following way,--that having had a long run of weary bad fortune,
she had rather not dwell on stories where things turned out as one
could wish to have them. She wants to go to heaven, she says, and
so she believes in God, and whatever else she must believe; but for
anything more, for special interpositions of Providence, and anything
one is not obliged to believe, she had rather say nothing about all
that. 'But don't tell them then as if you believed them; tell them
only as a pastime; just to oblige me.' I thought I had moved her, but
the utmost she would yield was to promise to think about it before
I came again: and when I came again she was as rigid as ever. It is
vexatious to think that a vast store is going to the grave with her
under one's very eyes and that one cannot touch it.
It is further to be remarked, that while there are thus a vast number
of persons holding the store of traditional myths, it by no means
includes the generality of the population; there is a still larger
class among whom every trace of such lore is lost. So destitute are
they of all knowledge of the kind, that it would be interesting to
trace back the antecedents of each, and so discover, if it might be,
the origin of this discrepancy; for not only have I found it impossible
myself to stir up any memory of such stories in half the people I
have applied to, (though, to all appearance, similarly circumstanced
with those who have proved the most communicative), but old 'gossips,'
sitting by while the stories in the text were being poured out, have,
time after time, displayed a wonderment which proved that their very
style was something quite new to them.
Nevertheless, in spite of all difficulties, a few years' patience
has put me in possession of a goodly bulk of popular stories not
yielding in interest, I think, to those of any other country. The
tales included in the present collection are but a portion of those
which I have gathered within the limits of the Roman State. I hope
to be able to complete at some future day the remainder that I have
gathered both there and from other divisions of the former Heptarchy
of Italy. The localities from which these have been chiefly drawn are
Palombara, Capranica, Loreto, Sinigaglia, Viterbo, Cori, Palestrina,
and, above all, Rome itself. One of my chief contributors had passed
her whole existence--infancy, married life, and widow-hood--within
the limits of one parish in the heart of Rome.
The collection has arranged itself, according to the spontaneous
titling of the narrators, into four categories, and it may not be
unimportant to note that Romans, always precise in their choice of
language, keep rigidly to these designations. I have, for instance,
been on the very verge of passing over a whole mine of 'Esempj,' or
'Ciarpe' by only asking for 'Favole' (and vice versâ). Remembering
afterwards to say, 'I daresay you can, at all events, recall some
"Esempj," or "Ciarpe,"' I have received for answer, 'To be sure;
why didn't you say sooner that such would suit you?'