Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman

Preface

Preface In 1941, while studying folklore at Wayne University with Professor Emelyn Gardner, Bruna Todesco collected from her mother, Clementina, the twenty-two marchen and legends presented in this book. Bruna, her mother, and her father, John, immigrated to America in 1930 from their native village of Faller in the Veneto region of northern Italy. Bruna remembered her mother's tales well and had always wished to have them published. When she died so young, in 1961 at the age of thirtynine , the project deposited in the university's Folklore Archive was forgotten.1 In 1974 John Gutowski, then director of the archive, discovered Bruna's collection of tales and immediately realized their importance. Here was the first ethnographic study of a northern Italian storyteller. The only other English-language study of the performance of Italian folktales north of Rome is Alessandro Falassi's work on the Tuscan veglia (story occasion) in an area about two hundred miles southwest of Faller. Falassi's Folklore by the Fireside: Text and Context of the Tuscan Veglia, published in 1980, contributes to our understanding of the performance dynamics of the narrative within the family context. We were invited to work on the collection because of our long association with Italian culture and ethnography. We were both Fulbright scholars in Italy, did extensive field work in both northern and southern Italy, taught for periods at Italian universities , and have lived in the Dolomite region, where Clementina Todesco was born. We have continued our field research in Italian-American communities in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, P R E F A C E New York, Pennsylvania, and Utah. A quarter century after Bruna Todesco Baroni's death, we are privileged to have this opportunity to present the tales Bruna recorded and to evoke the life of our storyteller, Clementina Todesco, and her odyssey from a rural Italian village to the great cities of the New World. xvm ...