Postulated Routes from Naples to Paris: The Printer Antonio Bulifon and Giambattista Basile’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France

A vast network of correspondence linking French and Italian intellectuals in the seventeenth century reveals three distinct routes by which Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti could have arrived in France in the 1680s. Each route begins with Antonio Bulifon (1649–1707), a French printer working in Naples, who printed an edition of Basile’s fairy tales in 1674. In the first scenario, the Benedictine monk and renowned scholar Jean Mabillon purchases a copy of Lo cunto while visiting Bulifon’s bookshop during his book-buying mission for Louis XIV in 1685. In the second, Mabillon orders the other copies of Lo cunto after his return to Paris in 1686. In the third, Bulifon carries the tales to France himself when he returns to conduct business in 1687. Many other plausible routes of transmission still remain to be investigated.