On the Development of Italian Folkloristics and Ethnography: From Renaissance Collections of Folk Literature to Positivism

The study offers a description of the difficulty of describing the boundaries between various study disciplines such as ethnology, folklore and ethnography in the context of pre­ and post­unitary Italy. In a specific paragraph are presented the oldest collections of fairy tales, collected by Giovanni Francesco Straparola (1480?–1557), Giambattista Basile (1566–1632) and Pompeo Sarnelli (1649–1724) and the first romantic attempts to comment on oral lore. Other paragraphs are devoted to the italian collectors of folk tales, with a particular attention on Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–1874), Vittorio Imbriani (1840–1886) and Costantino Nigra (1828– 1907), and to the theorists of folklore studies Ermolao Rubieri (1818–1879) and Alessandro d’Ancona (1835–1914). The study describes where folklore studies in Italy met with ethnographic studies and where and when they moved away from themselves.