Italian Popular Tales — Part 2: The Story of Catherine and Her Fate · The Crumb in the Beard
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part Two of the Italy shelf: Italian popular tales, from Italian Popular Tales (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1885) by Thomas Frederick Crane (1844–1927), Professor of the Romance Languages in Cornell University, who collected these stories from the great Italian collections of his day — above all the Sicilian tales of Giuseppe Pitrè of Palermo, to whom the book is dedicated — and translated them into English himself. Billed by collector and book, as the tales Crane gathered; not a survey of all Italian tradition, and no completeness is claimed. The tales were screened in the order they stand in Crane's second chapter under this shelf's standing rule, and a great many were set aside — every one stands named, with its reason, in the shelf register.
The Story of Catherine and Her Fate — a rich merchant's daughter, offered her happiness in youth or in old age, chooses old age; her Fate, a tall lady with a wheel, ruins her from post to post for seven years, until a little skein of silk, weighed against a king's treasures and his crown itself, will not balance. The Crumb in the Beard — Princess Stella, hidden behind a door at her father's banquet, finds a fault in every suitor but one, and him she calls dirty for a crumb on his beard; then a singing voice from the baker's shop below her window undoes all her pride.
Chapters:
0:35 Introduction
1:42 The Story of Catherine and Her Fate
11:32 The Crumb in the Beard
Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Popular Tales (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1885) — public domain.
Narrated by Violetta. Music: opening and closing theme, "The Spring Remembers," also heard as a short separator between the stories — the tales themselves are read dry.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
