A reading of Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales

LUCIA MASCINO • STEFANO FRESI, narrating voices

LUCA RANIERI, viola
MARIA CECILIA BERIOLI, cello
GIACOMO VEZZANI, live electronics, sound engineer

*Selections from Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales

Text selection: Teresa Azzaro – Lucia Mascino
Sound dramaturgy: Giacomo Vezzani

On the 40th anniversary of Italo Calvino’s passing (1985–2025), I Concerti nel Parco presents “Giovannin senza Paura”, a performance bringing to life some of the most celebrated tales from Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino.

In the late 1950s, publisher Giulio Einaudi entrusted Calvino with an incredible task: to gather and rewrite, in his own imaginative Italian, some of the most beautiful regional tales from across Italy, from the Alps to Sicily. Calvino embraced the mission with enthusiasm, and the result became a milestone of 20th-century Italian literature—beloved by children and adults alike.

A small selection has been made from the more than 200 tales Calvino collected, including both well-known and lesser-known gems such as The Ogre with Feathers, Cecino and the Ox, The Wedding of a Queen and a Brigand, and Giovannin senza Paura (Giovannin the Fearless), capturing the emotional richness of this vast cultural treasure and reconnecting us with our deepest roots, from north to south.

To interpret these tales, two of Italy’s most beloved and acclaimed actors—Stefano Fresi and Lucia Mascino—take on the roles of the main characters with their exceptional stage presence and voice.

The musical framework, designed to support and interact with the emotional narrative of each tale, combines live classical performance and electronic soundscapes, featuring works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, among others.

Italo Calvino (from the introduction to Italian Folktales):

“At times, it felt as if the lost logic that governs the world of fairy tales had escaped from the magical box I had opened and was once again ruling the earth.

Now that the book is finished, I can say it wasn’t a hallucination or a kind of professional fever.

Rather, it was confirmation of something I already believed deep down—the one conviction that motivated my journey through fairy tales:

I believe that fairy tales are true.

*Taken all together, with their endlessly repeated and varied human dramas, they are a general explanation of life—born in ancient times and preserved in the slow, thoughtful murmur of rural consciousness down to our day.

They are a catalog of destinies possible for a man or a woman, especially the part of life that consists in becoming who we are:

youth, from birth—which often comes with a blessing or a curse—to leaving home, facing trials to grow into maturity, and ultimately becoming fully human.

And in this grand design: the sharp divide between kings and beggars, yet their essential equality; the persecution and redemption of the innocent;

love discovered before it is understood, and immediately suffered as a lost treasure;

the shared fate of falling under spells—being shaped by complex, unknown forces—and the struggle to break free as a moral imperative:

to free oneself by freeing others;

loyalty and purity of heart as essential virtues leading to salvation and triumph;

beauty as a sign of grace, sometimes hidden under humble ugliness like a frog’s skin;

and above all, the fundamental unity of all things—people, animals, plants, objects—

the infinite possibility of metamorphosis of everything that exists.”*