1. Esempj, or those stories under which some religious or moral lessons might be conveyed, answering to what we call Legends. Though the word Leggenda exists in the dictionary, and is not altogether unused, I have never once met it among the people.
2. Ghost stories and local and family traditions. The latter are much more carefully preserved than among our own people,[8] and the Roman poor will tell the tale (more or less accurately) of the virtues and vices of their great families, with a gusto which shows that they look upon them as something specially belonging to themselves; but the former do not appear to have any recognised title, and the contempt in which they are held makes it very difficult to get hold of them, so that it is not very easy to avoid giving offence in approaching the subject. Only by a prolonged and round-about conversation one may sometimes elicit excellent specimens brought in as matters of curious personal experience by the very persons who, on direct questioning, had repudiated all knowledge of anything of the sort.
3. Favole. The word universally appropriated in Roman dialect for ‘Fairy Tales,’ a not unclassical application of the term, I think, and continued in the ‘Fabliaux’ of the mediæval period. But when asking for them I have never had any given me belonging to the class which we call ‘fables’ in English.
4. Ciarpe, expounded by Bazzarelli as parole vane, ciance; ciance being said, on the authority of Petrarch, to stand for parole vane, lontane dal vero, chiacchiera; chiacchiera being the equivalent for gossip. Versions of some stories in this category, notably No. 6, ‘L’Uccelletto’ (The Little Bird), and 21, ‘The Value of Salt,’ we all heard in our English nurseries, while those under the heading of ‘La Sposa Cece’ (The Simple Wife) belong to the same class as ours of the man who being told to give his wife her medicine in a convenient vehicle, wheeled her about in a hand-barrow, while she swallowed it; or that of the idiotic couple who wasted their three precious chances in wishing three yards of black pudding on each other’s noses, and then wishing it off again; but I do not know that we have any special technical designation for such. All the headings of which I have given the Italian are those used by the narrators themselves.
It is impossible, in making acquaintance with these stories in their own language, not to regret having to put them into another tongue. Much of what is peculiar in them, and distinguishes them from their counterparts in other lands, is, of course, wrapped up in the form of expression in which they are clothed. Divested of this, they run the risk of losing the national character they have acquired during their residence on Italian soil. I had purposed, therefore, originally, to print an Italian version, side by side with the English rendering, but was obliged to renounce the arrangement, as it would have proved too voluminous. I have only been able to preserve some few of the vernacular idiosyncrasies in the notes, for the benefit of those who take an interest in the people’s characteristic utterances.
I think I may safely say that the whole of the stories are traditional. There were only two of my contributors who could have read them had they even existed in print. The best-instructed of them was the one who gave me ‘Prete Olivo’ and ‘Perchè litigano i cani ed i gatti;’ both of which I am clear, from ‘asides’ which accompanied them concerning her father’s manner of telling, she had heard from his lips, even as she said.
With the exception of some of the Legends, Local Traditions, and Ciarpe, there are few, either printed in this collection or among those I still hold in MS., the leading episodes of which (if not the entire story) are not to be found in the collections of other countries; but certain categories common in other countries are wanting in the Roman. One could not in making the collection but be struck with the almost complete absence of stories of heroism and chivalry. There are some, indeed, in which courageous deeds occur; but there is none of the high-souled mettle which comes out so strong in Hungarian, Gaelic, and Spanish tradition, in many of the Teutonic and Breton, and some Norse and Russian tales. Several, we shall find, are identical stories, with the grand and fierce element left out. I have never come across a single story of knightly prowess in any shape. I have in MS. one or two dragon stories, but no knights figure even in these. At the same time, tales of horror seem equally to have failed to fascinate the popular imagination, and we can trace again the toning down process in many instances. I have in MS. several versions of the rather ghastly story of the boy who went out to discover Fear, but the Roman mind does not often indulge in such scenes as it presents. Similarly, horrid monsters are rare. ‘Orco’ himself is not painted so terrible as in other countries. Giants and dwarfs, again, being somewhat monstrous creations, are not frequent. The stories about the Satiri were only told me spontaneously by one narrator; one other owned to having heard of such beings on being questioned, but there is no general popular conception corresponding to the German ideas of wild men. I have never met anyone who believed in the present existence of any supernatural being of this class,[9] and rarely with any who imagined such had ever existed. ‘The stories always say, “there was a fairy who did so and so:” but were there ever fairies? Perhaps there were, perhaps there weren’t,’ soliloquised an old woman one day at the end of a tale; that was the strongest expression of opinion in their favour that came in my way. Another said once, ‘If there ever were such beings there would be now; but there certainly are not any now, so I don’t believe there ever were any.’[10]
Again, religious legends, with admixture of pagan superstitions, seem rare. English readers may say that there is superstition in some of the legends in the text; but they only exaggerate the literalness with which they deal with Gospel promises; there is little at variance with it. The false tale of the pilgrim husband, pp. 355–6, is the most devious from Christian doctrine that I have come across in Rome. I cannot fancy a Roman, however illiterate, gravely telling such stories as some of those which Mr. Ralstone gives us from Russia. The story of ‘Pret’ Olivo’ is doubtless derivatively the same as Dr. Dasent’s ‘Master Smith’; but the Roman version presents vastly less of the pagan element.
In winding up his general remarks on the migrations of myths, Prof. de Gubernatis gives as his opinion that ‘the elementary myth was the spontaneous production of imagination and not of reflection;’ ... that ‘morals have often been made an appendix to fables, but never entered into the primitive fable;’ that ‘art and religion have made use of the already existing myths (themselves devoid of moral conscience) as allegories for their own æsthetic and moral ends.’ And it appears to me that the Romans, in adapting such elementary myths to legendary use, have christianised them more than some other peoples.
Pacts with the Devil, in which the Germans revel, are rare; the story of ‘Pietro Bailliardo’ is one of the very few. It would seem that witchcraft never at any time obtained any great hold upon the people of Rome, nor were witches ever treated with the same severity which befell them in other parts of Europe. It is true that some stories about witch-stepmothers wind up with ‘e la brucciorno in mezzo alla Piazza,’[11] but I am inclined to think it is rather a ‘tag’ received from other countries, than an actual local tradition; and certainly by cross-questioning I failed to awaken in the memory of the ‘oldest inhabitants’ with whom I have had the opportunity of conversing any tradition of anything of the sort having actually taken place.