author
Giovanni Francesco Straparola
An early master of the framed tale, this 16th-century Italian writer helped carry folktales from oral tradition into print. His best-known book, The Pleasant Nights, gathered witty stories, novellas, and some of the earliest recorded European fairy tales.
1 Audiobook
![The nights of Straparola, volume 1 [of 2]](https://listenly.io/api/img/6a1009ead526f8ed6efd4853/cover.jpg)
The nights of Straparola, volume 1 [of 2]
by Giovanni Francesco Straparola
About the author
Little is known for certain about his life, but Giovanni Francesco Straparola is generally placed in the late 15th and mid-16th centuries and is associated with Caravaggio and later Venice. He wrote poetry as well as prose, yet his lasting reputation comes from storytelling rather than verse.
His most famous work, Le piacevoli notti (The Pleasant Nights), appeared in two volumes in the 1550s. Built as a frame narrative in the tradition of story cycles like Boccaccio's, it brings together dozens of entertaining tales told over a series of evenings.
What makes Straparola especially important today is the afterlife of those stories. Scholars and reference works regularly point to The Pleasant Nights as one of the earliest major printed collections to preserve and shape European fairy-tale material, including plot patterns that later became familiar across the continent.