Part two of the Sardinia shelf. Eight more folk tales of Sardinia from the south of the island, the Campidano, collected by Francesco Mango with Emilia Lippi-Mango and published in his Novelline popolari sarde (1890) — heard here in a fresh English translation made from Mango's own Italian. These are the eight tales that stood on the bench after Part 1: the whole of the volume's remaining screened stock. In Once There Was, a rich merchant offers his shop to whoever can tell him a story without once saying “once there was,” and two brothers lose their father's reins and saddle at the game before the youngest wins the shop with a melon. In The Girl Who Hated Smoke, the bride who would not have a smoking husband finds her silent bridegroom's trouble and begs him to smoke. In The Greedy Girl, a rich husband cures his wife of eating nothing but pasta reale — not by forbidding it, but by serving her everything else. In The Cheating Widow, a widow lives by her swindles — a goldsmith's watches, a dead child's burial turned to blackmail, a sea captain's silver — until she sells her three victims as slaves and is arrested; the child in that story was already dead of natural causes before she ever took him up, and the tale is carried exactly as printed. In The Little Whistle, Angiolino's magic whistle makes the whole world dance — his father, a judge, a priest, and Death herself — and wins him his promised place. In The Foolish Shepherd, Michele Fico forgets his own name on his wedding night and is locked out by his own rule. In The Three Stupid Girls, a mother's one warning is undone by three sentences of nonsense. And in The Devil, a youngest daughter marries a gentleman who is not what he seems, and the condemned souls in his locked room — one of whom tells, among her sins, that she killed her husband, a thing reported only and never shown — teach her how to be rid of him. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Blazing Fire, heard also briefly between the stories.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
2:26 Once There Was
6:14 The Girl Who Hated Smoke
8:25 The Greedy Girl
11:32 The Cheating Widow
16:20 The Little Whistle
20:23 The Foolish Shepherd
23:21 The Three Stupid Girls
25:12 The Devil
With this part, all eight tales that stood on the bench of Mango's volume have now been read; the bench is empty. Held for the owner's ruling by name: The Leaf of the Rose · The Poor Woman's Daughter. Excluded by name: The Fisherman and the Devil · The Death of the Poor Man · The Mother and the Daughter · The Master and the Servant · Solomon's Counsels · The Two Godfathers · The Prince and His Wife · The Three Sisters · The Two Godmothers · The Schoolmistress and the Stepdaughter · The Thirteen Bandits. No claim of completeness for Mango's book is made.
From Novelline popolari sarde, by Francesco Mango (Palermo, 1890), public domain — the Campidanese tales of southern Sardinia in a fresh English translation from Mango's Italian. Narrated by Benedetto. Theme: Blazing Fire.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud. Season 164, Episode 2.
