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The Piacevoli notti of Giovan Francesco Straparola, an obscure Italian writer whose descent may be traced in Caravaggio (a village nowadays in the district of Bergamo), has been rightly regarded as the European "capostipite principale dei repertori fiabeschi."1 In other words, it was considered a kind of incunabulum of the fairy tale where several texts, which would later enjoy a wider success with the most renowned and widespread collections of fairy tales, found for the first time their place within a literary genre. After a quick examination of the 73 novelle or "fables," according to the definition given by the author himself, one may immediately notice the multifarious form of the book. It includes unmistakable tales of magic, novelle in the manner of the Decameron, exempla, fables, twenty-three translations from the Latin Novellae of Girolamo Modini,2 and two vernacular novelle (in the bergamasco and in the pavano). Finally, all nights are opened by lines of verse: madrigali, canzoni, stanzas; and each tale is closed by an erotic enigma.3 Giving a thorough account of such a variety of disparate texts inserted in a framework clearly - and unnaturally - inspired by the cornice of the Decameron, would need a complex and articulate discourse which is beyond the aims of the present article. However it seems necessary to note that the wide narrative scope characterising the Piacevoli notti is both a distinctive mark "della galassia di tipologie e forme narrative che connota la narrativa dopo Boccaccio" and, most of all, "del disagio del narrare novelle regolari (in senso boccacciano)"4 in the years around 1550, although one has to concede that the novella was originally a genre with no rule. If, on the one hand, those years witness the highest peak of the popularity of the Decameron, printed in editions often provided with paratextual notes meant to make the reading of the whole work (or of selected novelle) easier to carry out, on the other hand, the book market seems also orientated to foster new literary products, around or "all'ombra del grande Libro."5
The Piacevoli notti indeed represented a new and peculiar book, both for the wide spectrum of its narrative forms and eminently for the choice of treating the folk story as a literary genre. The folk...