Giambattista Basile

• Poet
• writer
• courtier
• Italian
• Neapolitan

Giambattista Basile ( – 23 February 1632) was an Italian poet, courtier, and fairy tale collector. His collections include the oldest recorded forms of many well-known (and more obscure) European fairy tales. He is chiefly remembered for writing the collection of Neapolitan fairy tales known as Il Pentamerone.

Born in Naples into a middle-class family, Basile was a soldier and courtier to various Italian princes, including the doge of Venice. In Venice he began to write poetry. Later he returned to Naples to serve as a courtier under the patronage of Don Marino II Caracciolo, prince of Avellino, to whom he dedicated his idyll L'Aretusa (1618). By the time of his death he had reached the rank of "Count" Conte di Torone.

Basile's earliest known literary production is from 1604 in the form of a preface to the Vaiasseide of his friend the Neapolitan writer Giulio Cesare Cortese. The following year his villanella Smorza crudel amore was set to music and in 1608 he published his poem Il Pianto della Vergine.

He is chiefly remembered for writing the collection of Neapolitan fairy tales titled Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille (Neapolitan for "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones"), also known as Il Pentamerone published posthumously in two volumes by his sister Adriana in Naples, Italy in 1634 and 1636 under the pseudonym Gian Alesio Abbatutis. It later became known as the Pentamerone. Although neglected for some time, the work received a great deal of attention after the Brothers Grimm praised it highly as the first national collection of fairy tales. Many of these fairy tales are the oldest known variants in existence. They include the earliest known European versions of Rapunzel and Cinderella (with the Chinese version of Cinderella dating from 850–60 AD). Tales of Pentamerone are set in the woods and castles of the Basilicata, in particular the city of Acerenza. It was furthermore the first author to use the figure of the ogre in fairy tales.