Giovanni Francesco Straparola

Born in Caravaggio around the late 15th century, Giovanni Francesco Straparola was an Italian writer, poet, and collector of stories who later worked in Venice. Much about his life remains uncertain, which makes his surviving work all the more important.

He is best remembered for Le piacevoli notti (The Facetious Nights), a two-volume collection published in the 1550s. Framed as a series of entertainments told over several nights, the book brings together novellas, comic stories, and some of the earliest literary versions of fairy tales in Europe.

Straparola’s storytelling had a long afterlife. Scholars and reference works regularly point to his collection as a major early source for later fairy-tale traditions, and his tales were reused and adapted well beyond Renaissance Italy.