Stories from the Pentamerone

Neapolitan tales from the fifty told over five days by ten old women, in which Cinderella breaks a stepmother's neck, a girl is born from a myrtle, and an ogre is more reasonable than most fathers. Basile wrote them in Neapolitan dialect, and they were published after his death in 1634–36, and this is the first great European collection of fairy tales — Perrault and the Grimms both drew from it. The stories are coarse, funny and much older than the polite versions that replaced them. Thirty-three plates of Neapolitan street life, bay and market scenes by painters including Francesco Bassano the Younger and Sylvester Shchedrin, 1535 to 1871, give the tales their city.