When the mirror told her that Snow-White was more beautiful than her, the queen mother ...became pale with envy, and from that hour on, she hated Snow-White. She could then only think about killing her, about getting back her supremacy, but in the end she had to die, while dancing at the wedding of Snow-White and her prince.
When in the woodcutter’s house there was nothing but a breadcrust, the mother convinced her husband to abandon their children in the woods. But the wild animals did not devour Hänsel and Gretel, who defeated the voracious witch. They happily went home ...however, the mother had died  (...die Mutter aber war gestorben).
In every fairy-tale there is a conflict between old and new generations, and in the fairy tales filicide is the crime par excellence. It is often attempted, but never realized. 
Parental characters or actants are biological or adoptive parents, rich or poor, but also witches or fairies, ogres or magicians, merchants, kings or queens. Filial characters or actants are children subjected to their parents' will, and the tale is the vicissitude of their redemption. Going away is not enough: the main actants have to accomplish their imposed task, which is usually impossible; and their escape from a parental prison is full of risks, often mortal.

We call injunction the constraint imposed by parental actants on their children, who must act in order to survive and live on. If the tale goes on towards a happy ending, the main actants get their autonomy and a fecund love. The happy ending realizes everybody's aim: to ascend to the throne means getting rid of the parent's power. Becoming a free subject and marrying happily, means to meet a lover who is unrelated to one's own origin. This union is also fruitful.  
The drama of succession is intertwined in everyday life. We speak of generational conflicts and we forget that births and deaths occur seamlessly, making it impossible to distinguish between generations. This myth has its truth in the conflict between parents and children that exists from the Greek tragedy to our days, and it is not fading.
The last kind of myth pertaining to this conflict tells of how the old generations wasted the Earth's resources, making life difficult for the young generations. They acted like Hänsel and Gretel’s parents. Let us hope that the new generation can find a good solution.

Between tragedy and everyday life, the fairy-tales offer a free area, where all can enter without any licence; be they scholars or illiterates, Eastern or Western people, citizens of the south and of the north of the world, children, grown-ups and old people. All of them have the same competence and the same right to listen to and tell a fairy-tale. Fairy-tales present an extreme risk: succumbing before growing up. But they also represent a chance to escape a mortal danger and reach a happy ending. This happy ending is not realistic, it is simply true.  Let us think, for example, of the relief - at least of the spontaeous smile - that Snow-White gives us when she opens her eyes and sees - together with us - her enamoured prince and the happy seven dwarves. We can also imagine Cinderella finally dancing with her Prince Charming, while the stepsisters and all the guests move to the background to give them room in the palace.

If the shapes of the generational conflict are countless, why does Fabulando give ten of them? Our wish is not to build up any kind of catalogue, or to fix a new kind of classification. We only arranged ten moulds, to place the Sixty-seven fairy tales of our collection. We are simply offering a map, The Fairy Map of Succession.
It is only a fantasy map, a kind of topographic map. Its graphic elements come from a sixteenth-century geographic Map of Corsica, and its layout draws from two other maps. The first suggestion comes from the seventeenth-century French Carte de Tendre, that gives a topographic and allegorical representation of the different stages of the life of lovers. The second suggestion comes from the Carte du sens (Map of Sense), drawn by the mathematician René Thom in 1991. Here we do not want to explain or settle anything, we are simply drawing a map which allows us to move across the wide and complex world of fairy tales, which is difficult to explore. Fairy-tales can form a set which is homologous to human experience taken as a set. They developed through the unceasing exchange between peoples, writers and oral storytellers. Their narrative structure is one of the most powerful ones among the different kind of stories; it often spills into other genres, camouflaging itself without any effort. It is impossible to fix it, but we can offer a device to sail through it: a map. Whoever wishes to travel with us across the immense and boundless land of fairy-tales, may start with the Fairy Map of Succession.
When we look at the map of a city, our attention goes to a detail, a place that we already visited or heard of, or a place that we simply desire to know. In the map of a country our attention may focus on an image, or a name, and this may happen with our Fairy Map. Click after click, touch after touch, we can travel as we like, for some minutes or for a long time. Wherever we may find ourselves - reading an e-book, looking at a map of a fairy tale, of a quadrant or of an injunction, we can go back to the Fairy Map of Succession, which is the starting-point, or to this page, Fairinfo.

Let us now look together at the Fairy Map of Succession. 

In the lower part, we see the sea that represents the maternal side, because the south includes half of the fairy tales of the map which feature an injunction coming from the maternal actant. The north half of the map, with the mountains that represent the side of the father, includes fairy tales which start with a paternal injunction. If the main actant is a female, the tales are in the west side of the map, whilst the fairy tales are in the east side if their main actant is a male. The symbol of the female filial actant is the moon; that of the filial male actant is the sun.
We have then four quadrants, delimited by four rivers converging at the centre of the map, into the Lake of Generation. The fecundity that allows the succession of generations requires the encounter and the skin to skin contact both between parents and children and between female and male actants. Life goes on through the succession of the generations.

The Map presents ten symbols of Parental Injunctions, which may be only in one quadrant, in two, in three, or in all quadrants. Under every symbol of the injunctions, there is the title of a fairy tale that is the head of the list for that injunction in that quadrant. With a click or a touch on each symbol or title, we open the Map of the fairy tale.

Let us now look at a Map of the fairy tale. If for example, on the Fairy Map of Succession, we choose with a click or a touch in the southeast quadrant the Peak of the Impossible Task - Frog, Frog - we open the following Map of the tale. At the center of this map there is an image of the fairy tale.

By clicking or touching this image, we get the e-book of the tale.
In every Map of the Fairy Tale there is a little brown fairy linking to the Fairinfo section related to that tale or issue. Fairinfo gives information concerning the structure of Fabulando - like this one - and notes about every fairy tale.
By clicking or touching the upper left section, we get the Map of the Injunction of this fairy tale (the Peak of the Impossible Task). From this Map of the Injunction we can get the maps of all the fairy tales collected under this injunction.

Under the section of the injunction, we see the Northeast Quadrant, to which our fairy tale Frog, Frog belongs. By clicking or touching this image, we get the Map of the Quadrant. From this map we can get the maps of all the fairy tales belonging to the northeast quadrant.

The lower left section leads to the Fabulando Fairy Tours, which are itineraries we offer to visit the fairy tales of  Fabulando.
Looking at the same map, we can see two captions that are available in every map of Fabulando; one of them links to the Fairy Map of Succession, the second to the page of the Authors.

Every tale is told with an e-book, and some tales are told also through other digital media: e-kamishibai - a digital version of the Japanese paper theater or kamishibai - movie and history of the fairy tale.

                           

The map of The Frog Prince, for example, includes all the kinds of storytelling included in Fabulando. We can get them clicking or touching the relevant captions. (AG & CC)

Actant is the technical term used in the field of storytelling studies to define a character who acts in a fairy tale.
With an eye to our theoretical starting points, i.e. Russian Formalism, in particular Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), and French Structuralism, we define only four types of actants.
The key to understanding the arrangement of the Sixty-seven tales of our collection in the fairy map lies in the idea of succession. Each and every fairy tale tells of how a young descendant can become an adult. Being an adult means becoming autonomous and generative, able to untie one's parental bond, typical of childhood, and open oneself up to bonding with the other. From this perspective, we see our four types of actants, female and male filial actants and female and male parental actants.

The fairy tale always tells the story of a filial actant, because it tells how it is possible to grow up. Growth is not limited to childhood and adolescence, as it is always possible; whenever we learn something we feel more adult, regardless of our age.  The main actant is a young one, playing a filial role with the old or young actants that he/she meets during his/her journey. This is an experience of human growth. The reader and the listener may be seven or seventy years old, but they will regardless all identify with the young.
At the beginning of the tale, the main filial actants interacts with parental actants. They may be their parents, or characters that play a parental role because they are old or powerful, like fairies, ogres, witches, magicians, beggars etc. Each kind of relation between the filial main actant and the parental actant gives origin to a particular kind of tale. See in this Fairinfo the Injunction, to read something more about this subject.

We would now like to point out the difference between fairy tales with a female main actant and fairy tales with a male main actant, examining two tales starting with the same injunction, acted by the same parental actant, Sleeping Beauty in the Wood and Pig King. These tales begin with the injunction Sailing Ship of the Black Curse, and the curse comes from a female parental actant. The female main actant of the first tale is the world-famous princess who falls into a death-like sleep, the male main actant of the second tale is a prince that is a pig from birth. The events of these tales are quite different, as are the paths of these main actants. The first difference lies in the effect produced on the protagonists by the maternal actant.

Changing injunction and parental actant, we now examine two fairy tales belonging to The Fortress of Solitude: Sweet Diamond Pie and The Raven. Betta, female main actant of the first tale, and Milluccio, male main actant of the second one, do not want to marry anybody. Betta decides to make herself a man with sugar, almonds and rosewater, while Milluccio falls in love with an ideal woman that cannot be found. The beautiful husband of Betta soon leaves her for a foreign queen, and the tale tells of Betta's long journey to find him. In the tale The Raven, the younger brother of King Milluccio leaves to find his brother's ideal bride, and finds her at the mid-point of the tale. These two actants have to face many hard trials to get their happy ending.
In the Fairy Map of Succession we see the tales with female main actants on the western half, while on the eastern half we find the tales with male main actants.
Some stories represent an exception, e.g. Hänsel and Gretel and The Green Beaubird. These stories start with Gibbet of the Death Sentence, which is a dreadful injunction, particularly dangerous here because female and male parental actants deliver a death sentence. The young male and female actants must therefore act to escape death. Hänsel and Gretel wind up together in the clutches of the witch and they defeat her together. In The Green Beaubird three twins, two boys and one girl, are abandoned together and together they travel and gain the magical objects they need to get the happy ending for themselves and their royal parents. (CC)

This injunction is in four quadrants, since the parental male actant may impose an impossible task both to a male and a female descendant, as may also the maternal figure. When a fairy tale begins with the Peak of the Impossible Task, the main actants head for their imposed goal. The story tells of how they are able to accomplish the feat, even if it is impossible, because they cannot give it up. The main actants always complete their task, and then they live happily forever after, nearly always marrying a regal partner and ascending to the throne.  While the Fork of the Possible Task leads the main actant to failure, even to death, the Peak of the Impossible Task leads to a happy succession. If life were a task, it would surely be an impossible task. The main actants, who take responsibility for the task imposed by parental actants, address risks, overcome obstacles and fulfill their task. These actants always have their happy ending, like the actants of the fairy tales that begin with the injunction of the Labyrinth of the Impossible Commitment, wich differs from the fairy tales of the Peak in undertaking their task, because there is no parental actant imposing anything on them.

The fairy tale Mammone Cat tells of a stepmother who sends the beautiful Caterina to the fairies hoping that they will make her ugly. Caterina, weeping, sets out alone, and along the way she meets an old ragamuffin. She tells him her story and listens to him, who teaches her how to behave with the fairies. These are not the kind of instructions given by the parental actant in the tales of the Fork of the Possible Task. They make possible a kind of initiation, leaving Caterina free to act on them.

In Solver of Riddles, Solve this Riddle, a marquis promises to grant freedom to a prisoner if someone will ask him a riddle that he cannot solve. The main female actant wins the test and her father is pardoned. The enigma concerns the  ambiguity of language, its polysemy. This marquis, like Turandot, understands that there are riddles that he cannot solve, while he had previously been sure of being able to master them without any limit.

Three princes are tasked by their father king with finding the water that can cure his blindness (The Marmotta Queen). In another fairy tale a king gives his three princes the task of finding a wife by rolling three golden balls (Frog, Frog). In the first tale, the elder brothers interrupt their journey without finding the magic water for their father, while Andreino, the youngest prince, fulfills his task. The slander of his envious brothers endangers his life, but they cannot overcome him in the end. In Frog, Frog, the elder brothers get two beautiful girls, but Nicolino, the youngest one, finds only a frog in the ditch where his golden ball fell. Without doubting his task, he is sad but ready to marry a frog, when the animal turns herself into a princess. The youngest brother fulfils his impossible task and finally ascends to the throne together with his beautiful wife.

The Dying Fairy's Will gives us the chance to see that two fairy tales beginning with different injunctions can have the same plot. In this tale, starting with the Peak of the Impossible Task, a son promises his dying fairy mother to give his three sisters in marriage to the first three passers-by. He grudgingly executes her will, then an old hag bewitches him, so that he must find Bella Margarita. In the tale Three Animal Kings, beginning with the injunction of the Labyrint of the Impossible Commitment, the prince chooses to leave to find his sister, who had been abducted by three animal kings, while his parents try to hold him back. Well, his journey is nearly the same as that of the main actant of the other tale, and leads all the young actants to the same happy ending. The three bewitched husbands of the main actant’s sisters turn back into handsome kings and the main male actant overcomes the ogre who had imprisoned Bella Margarita and marries her. Four young couples come back to their four kingdoms, where their parents were mourning the loss of their heirs, so that the young princes and princesses ascend to their respective thrones and live happily ever after. (AG)

The injunction Labyrinth of the Impossible Commitment may give rise to fairy tales with motifs corresponding to the tales whose injunction is the Peak of the Impossible Task. In Fabulando’s collection, we see this by comparing The Three Animal Kings, belonging to this injunction, to The Dying Fairy's Will, which starts with the injunction of the Peak of the Impossible Task. In these two tales, three sisters go faraway with their animal husbands, who are bewitched kings, and their brother looks for them. He sets out on a long journey, at the end of which he finds his sisters, a beautiful wife for himself and the salvation for his brothers-in-law, who can turn back into human kings. The main actant of The Three Animal Kings takes up by himself the commitment to set off and find his three sisters, while the main actant of The Dying Fairy's Will carries out the last will of his mother. Then an old witch curses him so that he has to begin his journey.
Both these injunctions entail an impossible task, and all the fairy tales with this beginning have a happy ending. We could say that living is an impossible task, as are educating, governing, and psychoanalysis. Leaving out the latter, which is our job, the former two are impossible tasks that cannot however be renounced, regardless of whether they are undertaken voluntarily or not. Without them no human community or single subject exist. If we think of the impossible task or commitment like achieving the fertility required by the succession of the generations, we see that the subjects - fairy-tale actants - must leave their house, ready to face any risk and obstacle to reach their goal. Whoever avoids this task or commitment, constrains his/her life, following the illusion of mastering the processes of ageing and dying, and turns down the chance to give life to something new.
The three sisters of the main male actant of The Three Animal Kings live in a separate world. Their only brother recovers them and their three cursed animal kings, together with a princess who is held prisoner by a dragon. Once they are free, they can all return to their respective realms. The happy ending here means that succession can flow again in four realms that had been left without their heirs.

In the fairy tale The Seven Little Pigeons, there is the same separation between male and female descendants, but here it is a daughter who sets off to look for her seven lost brothers, and goes on a wonderful but hard journey. After many vicissitudes, the sister comes back home together with her brothers, and they bring home riches just as like Hänsel e Gretel did.

The main actants of Violet and The Golden Eagle do not follow any injunction but their desire, and they act with the determination of any actant who chooses an impossible commitment. Violet fills the gap between herself and the king’s son, who had tried to capture her. Arrighetto, main actant of The Golden Eagle, son of the emperor of the Magna (Germany), falls in love with the daughter of his father' main enemy, the King of Raona (Aragon). After a realistic European war between the two enemies and all their allies, peace finally comes, and the kings bless the union of their male and female descendants.

The folktale Smithy Menico begins with the impossible wish par excellence, which a poor but cunning smith can express and fulfil thanks to three magic gifts. The donor here is Jesus, with St. Peter as his assistant, who grants Smithy Menico three wishes. The main actant does not ask for wealth or other goods, but for something that will give him the power to cheat Death and the Devil.
In the Greek myth, the cunning god Prometheus takes humanity beyond its limits by stealing a spark from the gods, to endow men with fire. Smithy Menico is a smith, a little human heir of the Smith-God Hephaestus, who forged weapons and jewels, and he reminds us of the Latin saying unusquisque faber fortunae suae est (each man forges his own fortune). Smithy Menico cheats Death and the Devil thanks to his cunning and his three supernatural magic gifts. Finally he furtively gets a little place in Paradise, where he might even be able to force all the Blessed to dance by his magic violin. (AG)

In the tale Flower and Flowerstem the stepmother, who has just an ugly daughter, hates her beautiful stepchildren. Fiore is generous with some fairies that endow her with two gifts, when she would speak, flowers will come out of her mouth and when she would comb her hair, golden pearls will drop. Fiore’s magical beauty threatens her ugly sister and her old stepmother, who turns her and her brother out of the house. Their exile puts to an end when the king wants to marry Fiore, but her ugly stepsister takes her place, in a similar way to what happens in The Mammone Cat. Fairy tales usually tell that blossoming life does not stop itself, so that the deceits of the old mother and of the ugly sister are defeated.

The other three fairy tales beginning with this injunction have male main actants and a happy ending, as well as Flower and Flowerstem. The maternal actant exiles the female main actant because of her beauty, as well as maternal actants sentence Snow White to death and segregate Cinderella. Parental actants force the male main actants of our three tales of the Forest of the Exile because of their ineptitude. His father chases away and delegitimizes little John because he is looking for fear and the goose bump instead of learning a trade (Little John and the Shudder). The Cockroach, the Mouse and the Cricket tells how the father of Nardiello tries to teach him to become a merchant, but Nardiello wastes huge amounts of money so that he has finally to run away to escape his father beating him to death. The mother and the sisters of Dumbtony, in The Tale of the Ogre, are very poor, while he is a stupid layabout; when his exasperated mother beats him to death, he runs away. Dumbtony does not understand ambiguity in language, as well as the main character in Così finì il Tonto, nevertheless he may get chance to learn from his experience.

Looking at these three fairy tales of the Forest of the Exile, we can state a kind of rule, each time parents throw out their son, this youth can find his way to grow up and get a happy ending. Another kind of rule says that if the main male actant in a fairy tale is unable to provide for himself and damages his family, he must move away from his origin to grow up and survive, and even get a happy ending. The ineptitude of the main male actant means a failure of his education, however the tale does not tell anything about this failure's reasons. It only tells that the parents acknowledge it and stop looking for a remedy, allowing their son to leave or forcing him to go through the world, so that he may learn from his experience what he could not learn from them. The bond between parents and sons - or daughters - is so strong that without continuance solutions they become so hardly attached to each other that they risk to falling into a tragic area. The death of the main actants in the fairy tales beginning with the injunction Fork of the Possible Task represents this tragic area.

Anothe kind of tale, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, tells of the youngest son who had claimed his share to leave his father's house (Luca, 15, 11-32). His father divided his property between his children and let him go, without both asking him for any explanation and giving him any advice. The minor son squandered his riches and became a servant who suffered even hunger. Then he decided to go back to his father to ask him to welcome him as one of his servants, but his father, as soon as he saw him, took him into his arms and had a celebration for him. Even on this occasion, the father did not ask him or tell any explanation.

Educating is one of the three task that Freud defined impossible; nevertheless, it is impossible to stop doing it. The father of the parable, even quite different from the parents of the three male actants of the Forest of the Exile, behaves as a parent who knows that becoming adult entails a tremendous freedom that no educator can master. If parents take too much care of their ideal image, their narcissism prevents them from accepting their own limits. If they can bear the narcissistic wound that every son or daughter can inflict on their parents, they get the chance to grow together with their descendents. Thinking again of the parable we quoted, if the father is God, it tells that not even the Creator can save a man against his will. To try to do better than Father God is a dangerous madness, often masqued by unlimited love, both by believers and non-believers. (AG)

Let us introduce this injunction recalling a feeling that we all know, in a sad day and in a period our life, when nothing in our past looks fruitful, and all our resources seem unuseful for the future. Nobody really loved us, and our love, if we ever loved something or somebody, gave nothing anybody. The Marsh of the Dereliction reminds to this perception of ours, and fairy tales display it, telling of main actants who are so poor that their same survival is uncertain. Like contemporary underprivileged or illegal immigrants, these actants miss their parents and they may even be lost in a forest (The Lost Doll). Among the main actants of this section, just Madmatt has a mother, but he is ugly, foolish, and quite unable to earn his living.

As soon as the dereliction is told, these stories tell that into this stage there is however something that looks unuseful, like a cat, a doll or a speaking fish. But it can help the derelict actants to leave their mash and find a way to become even a king or a queen. The perception of our dereliction is common, but the way that these actants choose to follow their wish for a doll, or to listen to a cat or a fish, is not easy. To get their beloved doll, the main female actants of The Lost Doll and Pooavola Doll give up everything, and faithfully following their desire, they make possible their story and their happy ending. Madmatt and the future Marquis de Carabas (Puss in Boots and Master Cat or Puss in Boots) are hungry, and they would fill them up with their inherited cat or the fish they finally caught. Nevertheless, they listen to them, even if it looks impossible that those animals could change their fate. Hope and desire go together, as well as despair and lack of desire; and these stories tell how the first pair can work. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to give up the satisfaction of an urgent need of ours, which commands us by the tyranny of our symptoms, because following our desire means being ready to risk everything. The feeling of our terrible dereliction can stop our desire even from whispering something, because the dereliction is quite certain, while desire is lacking of any guarantee.

Let us now remember that fairy tales do not tell that following our desire we leave the mash and become queens and kings; they just tell that following it, listening to the faint voice that invites us to do it, is the only way to make it possible. The border between a childish certainty and a grown-up uncertainty presents itself every day, but we seldom acknowledge it. (AG)

Walt Disney introduced a tower (of the Segregation) into his version of Cinderella (US 1950), to increase the isolation of its beloved main female actant and the oppressiveness of her stepmother. Another tower, with just a little window, has characterized the tale of Parsley since its first version (Basile, 1634-1636).
The adolescent daughter normally feels herself and her own movements hindered by her mother; then she thinks that her mother is unfair or slow-witted, while during her childhood she loved and admired her. Her wish to go out, possibly without limits, grows together with the prohibitions introduced by her mother, who is now a rival. It depends on the haste of the daughter, who wants to enjoy the advantages that she imagines as a prerogative of the grown-up woman. To feel oneself Cinderella or Parsley is a common experience, not only during our adolescence, and these stories tell about this experience by simple means that should not deceive us. The art of storytelling here veils a rich meaning and a tragic conflict. The girl would to grow up quickly, putting her mother aside. Nevertheless the same girl is afraid of her mother’s retaliation, triggered by her own pretensions. Why her mother, now an old woman, does not give her way?
On the mother’s side, we see that she has to acknowledge that her daughter does not belong to her any more, that she is a woman already able to kindle an erotic desire, though very young and inexperienced. To acknowledge that being a true woman is no more her exclusive privilege, is so difficult for a mother that usually she is unable to do it.
There is the tower where the ogress shuts up Parsley, and the tower where, following Disney, the stepmother confines Cinderella, not to let anybody find her. Nevertheless, no tower or prison can stop this type of stories, that always end with the female main actant rejoicing together with her royal husband. Every fairy tale where a magic actant takes possession of a human girl, ends in the happiest way possible for the main actant. We then suggest to look at the injunction Tower of the Segregation as a constraint entailing the release of the main actant. Growing up entails a constraint that works as an injunction that the subject, the main actant, suffers; then, when she feels that this constraint is impeding her growth, there appears a means through which to be released.

Each injunction we chose to order our fairy tales in the Fairy Map of Succession, may be thought of as a constraint (French: contraint). Fabulando follows a model for growing up that would be impossible without a constraint. The constraint of metrics and a fixed rhyme scheme is the narrow way through which poetry and poems come, as well as the tower's only little window is the passage for Parsley to set off and for her prince to come in. In the last wonderful version of Cinderella directed by Kennet Branagh (US 2015) the song of the prisoner comes out from the highest little window of the tower, and her king does not need to find her any more. (AG)

In the east and west sea of the Map of Succession, the Sailing Ship of the Black Curse sails, missing from the paternal north quadrants of the map, as well as the Gibbet of the Death Sentence. The maternal quadrants is the sole agent for the most cruel injunctions, as if the mothers would be more dangerous than fathers for their growing children. It seems that fairy tales confirm the millennial tradition that looks at the woman as diaboli janua (devil’s door) and legis prima desertrix (law’s first deserter), from Eve with the snake. The women’s inferiority would depend on their being deriving from the man, while the man derived from God. Nevertheless, it is told that God created the world by his word, but He took something from Mother Earth to create Adam.

This male priority entailed the generative power, because up to the 18^th century scientist told that the homuncula lived in the sperm, whose name is in fact semen, while the woman had to nourish and grow the new creature (see also: Storytelling and Science). Nevertheless, the woman can become a superior creature if she lives just for her husband and children; like the Madonna, who has no stain of sin and has never leaded a man into temptation. There are more churches dedicated to the Madonna than to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Let us give a look to the Paleolithic Venus figurines, the first representations of human beings. Their bodies’ parts linked with sex and procreation are emphasized and realistic – breast, womb, buttocks and thighs –, while their face has no features and their forearms are missing, as well as and the lower part of their legs. From these feminine bodies the Paleolithic sculptors removed facial expression - therefore the speech -, feet - the autonomous movement - hands - the independent ability to relate. The woman should then stop and receive, like earth from the sewer. Che la piasa, che la tasa e che la staga in casa (Be she pleasant, be she silent, and stay she at home) still says a saying from the Veneto.

The Sailing Ship of the Black Curse and the Gibbet of the Death Sentence are only on the south quadrants of the map because they concern the feminine as earth. Males can penetrate it and reap its fruits, without knowing its mysterious deepness. The mythic image of women since the Old Stone Age veils and unveils the unknown, and it's right and duty of men to stop and to fear this odd mystery. Therefore, women hold the threatening unknown, darkness and death. So the menstrual blood can be a taboo, and many women are still veiled and segregated.

If women hold the extreme evil, they could consequently act it with dreadful effects. This mythic truth is still told by some ecology movements; Mother Earth will sentence humankind to death, because men outraged and poisoned her with their overbearing civilization. If this story were one of our fairy tales, we would place it in the southeast quadrant, and it should belongs to the injunction of the Sailing Ship of the Black Curse o to the Gibbet of the Death Sentence, together with the story of Avatar (James Cameron, US 2009). Let us now mention something about the ending of this film that has told its story all over the world. Jake Sully, the male main actant, saves himself turning into a Na’vi, a thin blue creature that might be more fine and good than the guilty man. The Earth, which is our only realm, is dying, and on Pandora just two male human beings survive. The chain of human generations stops forever in this almost unhappy dystopian ending.

The archaic feminine of the vindictive Mother Earth is still in force, but it does not belong to the female actants more than to the male ones. In fact, the fairy-tale curse and the warrant coming from the parental female actant hit both sons and daughters. The actants undergo these injunctions to free themselves from the power of this archaic mother and reach the field of speech. This difficult movement is a precondition to grow up. We then think of the Sailing Ship of the Black Curse and the Gibbet of the Death Sentence, as to paradoxical expressions, telling by hints something whose features are inexpressible. It has no words or expressions, like the Paleolithic Venus figurines, and the stories telling the drama of a subject who is imprisoned in this field are easily misunderstood. We should remember that they stage by words something escaping from the speech, like a psychosomatic illness. Many years after her delivery, it happensa that a mother has not have completely delivered her child, as if she would still keep parts of her children’s body - and mind. These female and male young actants - these sons and daughters - cannot really grow, since a part of them is still in her dumb womb.The stories beginning with the Sailing Ship of the Black Curse tell something about this condition.

The queen of Pig King becomes pregnant thanks to three fairies, which make her beautiful and inviolable, but they decide that this perfect queen will give birth to a pig baby. Life can flow even through her magic pregnancy and her acceptance of her animal baby. The Pig King turns into a handsome human youth thank to a wife who tenderly loves him as a pig too. Nevertheless, he forbids her to tell his parents that he is a man by night. His metamorphosis becomes irreversible after the birth of a human baby, when finally his royal parents learn of the human nature of their son. So, life flows again in the realm, now free from the strictness of the ideal.

In Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, the curse comes from an old fairy, who takes her revenge because the father king had forgot her. She has the same power of Athropos, the Greek Moira who cut the thread of the human life; nevertheless in the fairy tale it is always possible to mitigate such a sentence. The newborn princess will not die, but sleep for a century, together with all the dwellers of the castle. In the Greek mythology a human being betraying an oath was condemned to death. And if a god or a goddess did the same, they had to spend a long time sleeping like Beauty in the wood. Zeus appointed for Styx, goddess of the underground freezing river, the great oath of the gods. We remember this ancient myth because it brings us back to our fairy tales, since Styx means shudder, the unheimliche feeling that Dauntless Little John ignored, while another Little John missed and looked for it (Little John and the Shudder).

Another fairy tale in this section is a gorgeous Sicilian story, Misfortune. The curse of the female main actant depends on the nature of her Fate, a popular sister of the mythic Moirai or Norns, Latin Parcae. Her mother queen asks her daughter Misfortune to set off, in order to take her curse away from their house. European fairy tales have many precedents in the ancient literature, and they probably have had a long oral transmission, but their certain birth occurred in the 16^th century, when Giovan Francesco Straparola published some fairy tales among the novellas of his collection, The Facetious Nights. The modernity of fairy tales entails actants that represent modern subjects, individually acting, able to become free from parental authorities, to face their injunctions and follow the law of their desire to get their own aims. This Sicilian fairy tale gives us one of the best images of this chance, when Sfurtuna meets Gna Francisca (gna means signora, madam), who is the washerwoman of the king. Since when she had left her house, Sfurtuna was followed and damaged by her Fate, which leaves her now in peace, to wash, dry, mend, iron and starch the king’s clothes together with Gnà Francisca. The king is very pleased and gives more money to his washerwoman, who buys garments and rouges for Sfurtuna and her Fate, and ingredients to prepare some cakes. Then she sends Fortuna to offer these cakes to her Fate, who first refuses them, being an unpleasant ugly ragamuffin. Sfurtuna gives her some cakes and as soon as she can approach her, then grabs her, washes, combs her and dresses her with new clothes. Then Sfortuna’s bad Fate turns into a good Fate, and finally the main actant becomes a queen.
The water of the river where Sfurtuna and her master wash the king’s clothes is a feminine element, and their feminine work may represent the receptive attitude to manage dirty or threatening things, to turn them back into clean and comfortable ones.

My patients suffering from anorexic and/or bulimic diseases find significative and fruitful some motifs belonging to the fairy tales that begin with the injunction of the Sailing Ship of the Black Curse and the Gibbet of the Death Sentence. If we had no word or story to tie something imprisoned in a no-name place, we could never hope to take care of this kind of diseases. We have nothing but words, stories, and the psychoanalytic theories - Wittgenstein defined psychoanalysis a powerful mythology. Nevertheless, something favourable happens, if we remember that our instruments, words and stories, are false or fabulous hooks and baits, by which we can fish some true fish (I paraphrase here Freud [Constructions in Analysis SE 23, p. 262] who quoted Shakespeare: Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth - Hamlet, Act II Scene I, v. 61]). Neither a submarine nor a Delian diver could see the carps and the aquatic monsters in their element; moreover, we can only hypothesize the existence of this inaccessible reality, the unconscious, being unable to demonstrate it. Then it has not a stuff more real than dreams and stories, where fairies and fates dwell.

Nobody could organize a journey to go there, but we can imagine that journey, and in our mind we can, so to say, nourish, clean and dress again our fate. This would not be a real journey, but there is no movement without hope, and the thought and emotions move themselves by fantasy and imagination. This movement can move a new desire an open a walled up door, and the invisible journey has visible effects. (AG)

The injunction of the Gibbet of the Death Sentence means a hard conflict depending on the ambivalence that belongs to every important relation. The mother/daughter bond is the most vital as well as the most dangerous one. Without this hand-to-hand hug, life cannot flow, but life cannot go on if mother and daughter do not untie themselves.

To be born, to live, to die: three immortal sisters managed the thread of human life in ancient Greek mythology; the first drew the thread of life, the second spun it, and the third cut it. Their Greek name is Moirai, Latins called them Parcae. Not even Zeus could change the destiny spun and cut by Fates, and from the Latin word fatum, plural fata, comes the Italian fata, French fée, English fairy (from Old French faerie). Our fate is not in the hands of Zeus or in the hands of our parents. While we are running away, we can meet a helper fairy, or an old woman, or a house with seven little beds. Beyond the family world, that is the matrix of our life, there is a world where we enter taking a risk, to find a shelter, to receive a magic hazelnut. Life is greater than the laces that tie and imprison us to our story; the knots may be untied, even if they are tight and tangled. If Snow White made it, we too can hope to overcome our hindrances. (AG)

In the injunction Castle of the Forced Love the bond between father and daughter is so strong that there is a threatening or disgusting husband. In the tales of the Fortress of Solitude the parental actants may be lacking, not even mentioned – The Raven and The White Ricotta –, there is just a paternal actant who fruitlessly proposes to get married to his only daughter – Sweet Diamond Pie -, or his only son. So begins also the fairy tale The Three Citrons, written by Basile in 1734-36, who became a comedy by Carlo Gozzi in 1761, an opera by Sergej Prokofiev in 1919. 

The most famous tale beginning with this injunction is Turandot, written in Paris in 1710 by Pétis de La Croix, an orientalist scholar. He knew from Persian Literature the story of the beautiful princess who cuts off the head of her suitors who try her test and fail. Turandot is the last work of Giacomo Puccini, who died in 1924 before completing his Turandot, and the opera's first performance was held in 1926. Like in the fairy tale of Pétis de La Croix, Puccini's Turandot is set in an fabulous China, and in 1998 they staged this opera in the Forbidden City of Peking, as if the frosty princess had finally came back home. Fairy tales give birth to other fairy tales, nourishing imagination and dreams.

In the tale of Sweet Diamond Pie, the daughter of a merchant decides to make a husband to her taste and asks her father to bring her half a hundredweight of Palermo sugar, four or six bottles of scented water, spices and gems. She makes her creature, loves her ideal man and asks gods to give him life, remembering what happened to the Greek sculptor Pygmalion with his statue of Galatea. With the approval of her astonished father, she marries her Sweet Diamond Pie, but a queen steals him and she has to set off to find him again. Her journey to get back her lost beloved has its prototype in the pilgrimage of Psyche abandoned by Amor in the tale of Apuleius, and recurs in the popular versions of Pig King (see also: Il Re Porco e Amore e Psiche, website Adalinda Gasparini, Psicoanalisi e favole).

The Raven, like The White Ricotta that is one of its popular versions, is a cruel and bloody fascinating fairy tale. The main male actant is a king that reigns without any limit to his passion for haunting, so that he neglects his affairs of state. Refusing to marry, he stops the alternation of generations, but then he falls in love with an ideal wife, imagined by him when he sees three colours togethre: the red blood of a dead raven, the black of its feathers and the white of a marble stone. There is a odd reference to death in the white marble, as well as in the red and black of the raven. The younger brother of the king sets off to find this ideal bride, but this search causes his own death.
The main desire of the king is a girl whose colours refer to death. The only bride he wants has something dead in herself, so that the king longs for both life and death, for the flow of generations and their stop. In fact, the wife has a necromancer father in The Raven, while her parents in The White Ricotta are a two terrible dragons. The younger brother finds this wife, but he sacrifices his own life to protect the king. The happy ending here does not come before many losses, including the petrifying of the younger brother and the killing of the king’s two babies. The king who looks both for life and its refusal causes death for his brother and others.

The Grimm Brothers knew well The Tale of Tales by Basile, and the colours of the female main actant of this tale could have given them the colours of Snow White, who has to lie as a dead. Among the most famous fairy-tales female characters, she is the only princess characterized by black hair, and her colours come from her mother’s wish. The queen would a baby as white as snow, as black as the black ebony wood of her window and as red as her blood, which fell into the snow when she pricked her finger with a needle. As well as the main actants of The Raven, the mother queen of Snow White gives life to her daughter and then she tries to kill her.

There are interesting differences between The Raven and The White Ricotta, when the king knows that his younger brother has sacrificed his life to make him happy. In The Raven the king loves the statue of his brother more than his babies, and kills them causing a fatal pain to his wife. Her necromancer father then comes like a deus ex machina to turn that tragic conclusion into a happy ending. In the popular Calabrian tale the king hears her wife’s dragon parents - who now turned into two pigeons - talking of the mean to give back life to his brother, giving his babies just a temporary death.

This cruel fairy tale presents a king who stopping the flow of generations in the fortress of his solitude, staring at an ideal image, which is then linked to death, while his younger brother lives only to satisfy him. The desire of a new life raids this ideal’s mirror, the same fatal mirror of water that caught Narcissus. The story tells that a very long journey, an abnegation that sacrifices all one’s goods, even life, can cure the main male actant of his attraction for a dead and alive object, like a statue, a fancy or a mirror.

The Castle of the Forced Love, as well as the Tower of the Segregation, appears in our Map only in one quadrant. We see it in the Northwest Quadrant, since the fairy tales we chose have a main female actant, who has to live together with a monster in order to save her father's life.

With the same injunction starts the type Donkey Skin, whose most famous version was written by Perrault. This story tells of a widower king who promised his dying wife not to marry any woman but beautiful like her. The king sees that his daughter is the only woman right for him, and wants to marry her. But the princess runs away covered with an animal skin, which like a second skin hides her beauty. At the end, she will happily marry a foreign prince. In Fabulando there is also The She-Bear by Basile, which is the first version of this fairy tale, and a folk version, The Tacconelle of Woody Maria. (For the type Donkey Skin, see also two Italian dialectal versions, O dente d'oo, from Liguria, and Maria Intaulata, from Sardinia, website Adalinda Gasparini, Psicoanalisi e favole).

To this injunction belong popular tales of the type Cordelia, which tell of a king who, like Shakespeare’s King Lear, asks his three daughters to say how much they love him. This type is represented in Fabulando by Rot-Eyes. The actant of this tale is banished by her father because he does not accepts her answer, like King Lear. Cordelia said that she loved her father Lear, but she knew that she will love also the man who will marry her, while her elder sisters had declared a total love for their father. It is interesting to understand how the tragedy and the fairy tale, having the same beginning, have so different endings. (About these tales, see: Marian Roalf Emily Cox, Three Hundred and Forty-five Versions of Cinderella, Catskin and Cap O' Rushes, London 1893; see also Adalinda Gasparini, La Luna nella cenere. Analisi del sogno di Cenerentola, Pelle d’Asino, Cordelia, 1999)

In the type of Beauty and the Beast, which is the most popular tale of its type, the main female actant is ready to give her life to save her father. Beauty's father picked a rose for her in the garden of the Beast, who can spare his life just if one of his daughters will come and take her father’s place. The filial actant is ready to die for the parental actant, inverting the natural flow of life. Then the main female actant stops her life, and the tale goes on with the meeting with the monster. The Beast replaces her idealized father and treats Beauty like a queen, melancholically accepting that she cannot love and marry him. An impossible relation between beauty and  ugliness follows the ideal relation between father and daughter. Beauty saves her bond with her father accepting to be the prisoner of a repulsive being, while the Beast tries to win Beauty’s love to get free from the curse that made of him a monstrous being. The main actant of this fairy tale is Beauty, since her father acts the injunction, while the Beast lives alone in his castle because of a duress that had happened before the beginning of the tale. When turnsthe Beast finally  into a beautiful prince, he reveals that he refused to marry a powerful woman, that is to say a maternal actant, who cursed him; just a girl ready to marry him in spite of his animal shape can save him.

In the fairy tale Frog, Frog we see a beautiful princess who finally reveals to the incredulous prince Nicolino that she was just the frog that he thought to marry,

Yes, here I am, you have to know that I was under a spell, and I ought to be a frog as long as I could find a boy who would marry me without knowing my beauty.

In Fabulando collection there is a fourth type, an animal - here a frog - helps the main female actant and asks her to eat from her little plate and sleep on her pillow: The Frog Prince. Here the king father orders his daughter to keep her promise, when the princess does not open the door to the poor little animal. About this princess we only know that she loves to play with her golden ball, and that she will not having a frog near her. Her father king then forces her to fulfil her promise, leaving the frog coming on her pillow. Just when she kisses the slimy frog, in spite of his animal shape, she breaks the spell that condemned him to that animal shape. The prince finally tells that his curse came from a female character, then we note that he had to live into water, which traditionally is, together with earth, a female element.
In the injunction of the Castle of the Forced Love the paternal actant is a father who tries to tie his daughter forever to himself, or a father who willy-nilly causes the union of his daughter with an odd or an invisible lover. Amor is invisible in the Latin tale Amor et Psyche by Apuleius, that could be the prototype of the this kind of fairy tales (see also: Amor et Psyche, Fabella, website Adalinda Gasparini, Psicoanalisi e favole)

To idealize the loved one might look as a form of great love and devotion, which however implies the incestuous bond with the parent loved and mythicized in childhood. Only the gradual acceptance of the troubling extraneousness of the other, unravels the injunction of the Castle of the Forced Love. It makes no difference if the story tells of a father who requires to marry his daughter (type Donkey Skin) or of a daughter who would die to save her father’s life. Children do not choose parents, it is a kind of forced love that is necessary to grow up; girls and boys normally love and idealize them in childhood, while maturity requires that children work the loss of this ideal. To become adult means to give up the ideal parents, together with the daughter’s and the son’s image of perfect creatures, being the ideal partners of that ideal lover.

The incest taboo marks a boundary between parents and descendants, so that we can understand that time flows irreversibly, to make possible the separation between generations and their alternation, with the fertility that renews life. The female and male filial actants need to gain experience of their mutual desire, risking loosing each other. The Beast is afraid that Beauty will not come back to him, but he lets her go, while Beauty is afraid that the Beast died for her fault, and to save him accepts to marry him in spite of his ugliness.

In the northwest quadrant the moon of the main female actant lights the Paternal Mountains, and here we find very close daughters and fathers, be they king, merchants or villains, and fairy tales that flow from this relation. The fairy tale that explicitly refers to the incest, is Perrault's Donkey Skin (Peau d'âne). In Italian dialectal collections we find The Tacconelle of Woody Maria, in Molise, and the Ligurian O dente d'oo (available in the website Adalinda Gasparini, Psicoanalisi e favole). In the 16^th century collection by Straparola we find Doralice, the prototype of Donkey Skin, the female main actant of which has to run away from her incestuous father. In the 17^th century collection Tale of Tales by Giambattista Basile we find two fairy tales of this type, The She-Bear and Penta the Handless The incestuous king of this last story would marry his sister. In Perrault's tale and in many following popular Italian version the main female actant imposes on her father to provide her with wonderful dresses that give her the brightness of the sun and the grace and beauty of the sea. Her father always gives her what she asked, making her nearly a goddess of nature. Not to marry her father, the daughter must then run away, covered with the skin of an animal. The animal in Perrault's version is a donkey, in the English tradition it is a cat, in other version we can find a wood-dress, or the skin of a dead woman, who died hundred years old. Together with the wonderful gowns, which the daughter secretly keeps, the repulsive skin veils and unveils the incestuous love.

This clearly incestuous fairy tale shows the character of the northwest quadrant, a father who imposes himself on his daughter, and a daughter who cannot do her life because she is bound to her father. The first love of every girl is her father, and if she does not stop keeping him as her ideal lover, she will not be able to love a human being, who can never correspond to an ideal image.

There are then fairy tales characterized by a metaphorical incest, like Rot-Eyes and Beauty and the Beast. In this stories a father loves his daughter so much that he risks his life to pick a rose for her; the daughter loves him so much that she is ready to offer her life to save her father. The love ideal is so strong that the transformation and the happy ending come just after a long closeness with the opposite of the ideal, the Beast.

In the Calabrian Provençal tale Solver of Riddles, Solve this Riddle, the incest concerns the nourishment that a daughter gives her prisoner father. This incest gives the riddle par excellence, and since the solver marquis is not able to solve it, the main female actant gets freedom for her father.

In The Lost Doll the main female actant is the beloved daughter of a king who suddenly dies. She loses her father and the doll that she always kept near herself, and her happy ending cannot come if she does not find out her doll. This doll means here the ideal image of the princess, a part of her identity that she needs to grow up. A prince has found the lost doll, and fell in love with this ideal image; the princess find her lost doll with him, and they get happily married.

In the tale of Sweet Diamond Pie the main female actant loves so much her ideal partner that she does not leave her father's house. Then she gets from her merchant father the ingredients to make a man of her taste.

In the tale of Violet the main actant demands to be an ideal for her prince, and escaping all his attacks she arouses his desire. She leads a courteous cunning game that however would not be enough to get a happy ending. As well as in every fairy tale of this quadrant, the ideal needs to confront itself with its opposite, that here is an ogre. This clumsy ingenuous creature adopts the cunning beautiful Violet, and this combination of opposites is the ingredient that every fairy tale in this quadrant needs to reach an happy ending. (AG)

Finding a fairy tale on the web is very easy. We open a search engine website, then we
 write the title, Cinderella for example, and we get a list of a hundred or a thousand links. We never explore them all; we stop at the first three or four web-pages. There we find indications for some sites containing a famous version of the tale, usually simplified, often complete with illustrations or glittering movies. Then we find links for films, movies and live action, and for theater performances. We can find out – if we do not already know it - that Rossini composed an opera, La Cenerentola, up to now represented in many opera seasons. But we probably do not know anything about Cat Cinderella, the first amazing version of this tale, published in Naples in the 17^th century. In Fabulando there are other beautiful fairy tales that Disney never retold, Little Chickpea, Frog, Frog, Dauntless Little John, The White Ricotta, The Green Beaubird, belonging to the Italian and European folk heritage.It is ulikely to find these at the top of a web search, unless we look for them specifically. This would require prior knowledge of the existence of this heritage. Nevertheless, these tales are freely available on the web, but it is nearly impossible to find them if we are not already expert on this subject.
Well, one of the main principles guiding our project to build Fabulando, as well as our choice of different narrative means, is to provide easy access to numberless fairy tales available online in many versions. There are countless collections of ancient and classical tales, written in local dialects or in national languages, which remain unknown.

There is another principle guiding our work. We love the beautiful old books of fairy tales, we enjoy their charm, page after page, image after image, surprise after surprise, and we believe that it is possible to get this pleasure also by digital means, like our Fabulando e-books. (CC)

Fabulando tells all the Sixty-seven tales of its collection - in an e-book, a digital book that however has the colours and the rustling of a paper book, and the finest illustrations of the great artists of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. We made original headletters for the e-books of our collection from their wonderful children’s books.

We told almost every fairy tale in two e-books, including the tale in the original language and the facing translation in the languages we chose, Italian, that is our mother tongue, and English, which is now the international language. We drew the original language versions from the major collections available online; the Italian dialectal fairy tales come from 19^th and early 20^th century collections, the ancient fairy tales come from 14^th, 16^th and 17^th century Italian collections, the European tales come from the collections written by Charles Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, and others.

The e-books of these four sections bear the following titles on their covers:

1. People of Wonders. Italian Dialectal Fairy Tales
2. The World’s First Fairy Tales. Published in Italy from  the 16^th to  the 17^th century
3. Europa in fabula. The World's Most Beloved Fairy Tales
4. Migrant Stories. Tales without Borders

The e-books have an end page with the sources of original language and translated versions, of illustrations and headletters and of the ancient geographic maps; there is then a link on this page to get the general Bibliography of Fabulando, with the links to fairy tale collections available online.

We transcribed the Italian dialectal fairy-tales and the English, German or French ones from the quoted sources (see the final page Fonti/Sources in every e-book, and the Fairybiblio, Bibliography of Fabulando) keeping the punctuation marks of the original edition. The punctuation variety is a mirror of the variety of the verbal, narrative and symbolic language of the fairy-tales. (CC)

E-kamishibai is the word we use in Fabulando drawing on the word e-book. Just  as e-book means ‘digital book’, e-kamishibai means ‘digital kamishibai’.
Kamishibai means in Japanese ‘paper drama’. It spread throughout Japan in the period between the World Wars, when the kamishibaya, who were storytellers, went along the streets of the towns by a bicycle, equipped with a little wood theatre. The kamishibaya told his tales scrolling through this little theatre a set of illustrations. Everybody could stop and listen to the tale, but the kamishibaya reserved the first rows of seats to children who bought the kamishibaya's candies before the show. Brightly coloured illustrations slid in the little theatre and greatly impressed the public. It was a real picture storytelling, animated by the kamishibaya's voice and gestures. The kamishibai was very popular: when TV came to Japan they called it denki kamishibai, ‘electric kamishibai’.

In Fabulando many illustrations come from the work of Walter Crane (1845-1915) who retold through images many popular fairy tales. We imitated the Japanese kamishibai and adapted it to the digital media, reworking these illustrations to get a wider set of images. Everybody can slide with a touch or a click to tell the fairy tale as he/she likes, just like a real kamishibaya.

We have an e-kamishibai for these fairy tales: Beauty and the Beast, Little Brier Rose, Cat Cinderella (by the Authors of Fabulando), Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Master Cat or Puss in Boots, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and The Frog Prince. (CC)

We retold Puss in Boots and The Frog Prince also through movies that we realized reworking illustrations of Walter Crane that enchanted us with their beauty, their expressive power and their intelligence. The original images are five for The Frog Prince, seven for Puss in Boots. Following our respect for Crane’s work, we disassembled and re-assembled his images, to build a movie covering the whole story of these two fairy tales. We inserted some captions to make the tales understandable, following the finesse, the humour and the rhythm that are typical of folk tales, then we wrote our captions in rhymes. We made their font inspired by the captions of a very famous silent movie, The Thief of Bagdad (US, 1924). Our movies have original soundtracks composed by Federico Riondino who played theme variations of O che bel castello (popular nursery song), I’ te vurria vasà (Eduardo di Capua, 1900), Te voglio bene assaje (1839 c.a.), together with Ugo Nativi and Lorenzo Nardi.

We would like to say something else about Puss in Boots. Walter Crane illustrated the most famous version of this tale, Master Cat or Puss in Boots by Charles Perrault. We inserted this tale, well known throughout the world, among our European fairy tales, but we chose to rework the first version of Puss in Boots published in the world (La Gatta, available on the website Adalinda Gasparini, Psicoanalisi e favole). It belongs to the 16^th century collection The Facetious Nights by Giovan Francesco Straparola, and it tells of a madam cat. So, Fabulando offers Puss in Boots and Master Cat or Puss in Boots, with the same illustrations. Nevertheless, we chose to realize our movie starting from the first charming version, which is less known. (CC)

	Puss in Boots
	The Frog Prince

The version of Cinderella told by the Authors has a special place in Fabulando. Besides an e-book and an e-kamishibai, the map of this fairy tale gives access to an iPad app that we realized disassembling and re-assembling the illustrations by Arthur Rackham and retelling the story from the versions by Giambattista Basile (1634-36), by Charles Perrault (1697), by Walt Disney (1950) and by the folk Florentine version La Cenerentola (Imbriani, 1877). Our app is entirely devoted to Cinderella, and every page consists of a written text, a little movie and a narrating voice. There is also an original soundtrack.

The app is freely available, with Italian, English, Modern Greek and Latin text. About our Greek and Latin translations: we wanted to pay tribute to our classical culture, that upheld across the millennia its generative flow in thought and narrative, up to contemporary storytelling

(To download this app go to the Map of the Tale; other news about it are also available). (CC)

There are two little e-books in Fabulando where the Frog himself (The Frog Prince) and the Cat herself (Puss in Boots) tell the key points of the story of their tales.
Every fairy tale has an interesting history that could highlight its links with other tales and other cultural forms, like literature and cinema. We chose the stories of these two tales for their great storytellers (the Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault respectively) and for the charm of the histories of these stories.
The history of Puss in Boots arouses curiosity because of its gender changes. In nearly one and a half century, a she-cat, inherited by the main actant from his mother, becomes a she-cat inherited from the father, and then a he-cat that the protagonist inherits from his father. In the e-book we try to understand why the last version prevailed, becoming the tale that everybody knows.
On the other side, The Frog Prince, in the version by the Grimm Brothers, shows its deep bonds with medieval literature.

	Puss in Boots
	The Frog Prince

The main female actant, Cianna, wishes to find her seven brothers who left their home when she was born, due to an oversight of their mother's midwife. The sister finally finds her brothers that are in service of a misogynous ogre. The happiness of their encounter does not last for a long time, because the seven brothers turn into seven little pigeons, due to a mistake of Cianna. She then decides to find the way to make her brothers human again.  To do this she must find the house where Time lives, because he knows the secret of this metamorphosis. Along her hard long journey, Cianna listens to creatures asking for her help and giving her precious instructions to get the house of Time. Then she reaches her goal: she makes her brothers human again and grants the wishes of the creatures that she met along her way. The same creatures help her and her brothers again to overcome some hurdles on their way back.

This tale may be one of the most beautiful fairy tales written by Basile, both for its complex and coherent plot and for the fairy tale's ethics that it clearly displays: the main actant frees herself by freeing others, every other creature she meets along the way.

Il Gran Basile presents in this fairy tale a long interesting list of predators and little birds, told by the seven brothers of Cianna to reproach her after their metamorphosis. We present an IMAGE of all these birds, and a TABLE with various Italian and English translations of the names listed by Basile, from which it is possible to open their photograph and hear their verse. (To open them, in the website Psicoanalisi e favole of Adalinda Gasparini, click the following words: IMAGE, TABLE)

This fairy tale has a female main actant and starts with an implicit maternal injunction, so we find it in the South West quadrant. Its injunction is the Labyrinth of the Impossible Commitment, since Cianna chooses by herself to make amends for the involuntary mess due to her and her mother's oversights. (AG)

Jesus and his Apostles arrive to the house of Smithy Menico, travelling incognito. Jesus sends St.Peter to beg for something and the poor smith gives him one coin. Then He sends St. Paul, and the smith gives him another coin. The third time Jesus himself goes an ask alms, and Smithy Menico gives him his third and last coin. Whith his three coins he could buy some bread, a cigar and the oil for his lamp, and he has nothing more, so he can neither light his room, nor smoke a cigar, nor something to dine. But Jesus sends again Saint Peter to the smith to grant three desires of his. Smithy Menico does not ask wealth, palaces or youth; he asks that his violin, his stool, and his fig tree get magic powers. Some time passes, and Death and Devil come one after another to take him, but Smithy Menico blocks them by his magic gifts and by his slyness.
This main actant fulfils the impossible human aim par excellence, since Death or Devil cannot take him.
After a very long life, the smith decides to go and see the Hereafter, but St. Peter bans him from entering heaven, saying that Smithy Menico wasted the Lord's gift, because he did not ask for the eternal salvation for his soul. Then the Angels of purgatory to reject him, and Smithy Menico knock on the hell's doors. The devil who met him on the earth then advises all the devils to keep out Smithy Menico, because he is much more evil than themselves. Smithy Menico goes now back to the heaven's doors, and taking advantage of a distraction of St. Peter, he throws his jacket inside, and sits on it. If we go there, is told at the end of this fairy tale, we could  see Smithy Menico still sitting on his jacket, holding his magic violin, with which he could make dance even the saints.

In other fairy tales it is told of actants who do not fear anything, nor death. The actant of one of these tales is Dauntless Little John, who is not afraid because he simply does not know death: for this reason, he dies as soon as he sees his own shadow. The actant of another tale, Little John and the Shudder, does not know death, but he feels that he misses something, and goes around the world looking for shudder. He happens to marry a princess, but the happy ending only comes when he finally feels goose bumps.
Smithy Menico knows very well death, and he is so scared, that he chooses his three magic gifts to become able to win it. Smithy Menico is a laic parable as well as a fairy tale; telling that overcoming death and fear is an impossible commitment.But it tells also that one can try to get it, and if he succeeds, he is free from any masters, here and in the hereafter. He is neither alive nor dead, neither forgiven nor guilty. He represents the eternal human desire to cross his boundaries.

The fairy tale of Smithy Menico is in the North East quadrant, because St. Peter represents during the whole tale the antagonist paternal character, disapproving the choices of our cunning fellow Smithy Menico. The injunction of this tale is the Labyrint of the Impossible Commitment. (AG)

“I am not afraid,” said Nardiello, “for in that time I am man enough to consummate the marriage, thy daughter and all thine house.” (The Cockroach, the Mouse and the Cricket e-book, p. 45)

...in such wise that he could have said with Petrarca, “From love it extracted thence a subtle liquid”.
The bride hearing the grumbling stream of the bowels, “the aura, the odour, the breeze and the shade”, awakened her husband (Ibid., pp. 58-60)

The sapper cockroach changes the royal alcove into a sickening place, and the second night the defence of the bridegroom, who barricades his orifice with a trench of bands, clothes and underpants, is useless. If the cockroach cannot enter like the first night, the mouse steps up, and gnawing at the trench he opens a breach for him, so that the insect,

… gave him another medicinal dose, in such a guise that a topaz sea came forth, and the Arabian perfumes infected the whole palace. The bride being tainted with such odour awoke, and sighting the orange deluge which had coloured the white Holland sheets to Venetian tabby, holding her nose, flew to the chamber of her handmaidens. The wretched bridegroom, calling the valets, loudly and at length lamented his misfortune, that through a lax foundation the greatness of his house would be closed (ibid., pp. 65-67).

To prepare himself for the third night, the bridegroom blocks his orifice with a custom made wood plug, resolving to stay up not to lose control. Now the cricket takes action, sending the German groom to sleep with his sweet singing, but the mouse, finding a barrage that he cannot open with his teeth, cannot make way for the cockroach. Then the mouse goes to the larder and dips his tail into a jar of mustard, and then he rubs his tail several times under the nose of the bridegroom,

…and he began to sneeze so loudly and strongly, that the stopper came forth in a fury, and as he lay with his back turned to the bride, it struck her mid-breast with such a blow that it nearly slew her. And she screamed and screeched, and at her screams the king ran in, and enquired of her what ailed her. She told him that a petard had been shot at her breast. And the king marvelled with excessive marvel at such a folly, and wondered how a petard on her chest she could speak; and lifting the bed-clothes, he found the bran mine, and the petard's stopper which had hit the bride, and made a good mark in her breast; although I know not which caused her more disgust, the stink of the powder, or the blow from the ball (ibid., pp. 79-81).

Then the king chases away the German nobleman. The king gets upset thinking that that disaster came from his unfair death sentence, and misses the innocent Nardiello. The three little magic animals promptly come to cheer him up, telling him that the legitimate pretender is alive and that they are ready to go and get him. Then they turn him into a handsome youth, worthy husband of the princess, and all live happily ever after.
Moreover, they send for the merchant father of Nardiello, to make him share his son’s royal prosperity. Let us think that he deserved it, because he acknowledged the failure of his upbringing.
Otherwise Nardiello would not have set off and found his own way, getting something that his father could not even dream.

Basile devotes more than one third of this tale to the scatological war operation of the three little animals, who act for the sake of Nardiello, who loves them and takes care of them. They return his love leading him to conquer the princess and defeat all his opponents.
Art wins over common sense, personified by the merchant father, and the German nobleman, who makes use of doctors and counsellors, also military ones – a young bombardier suggests the wood plug -, and the power personified by the king. It happens in this fairy tale, and goes on happening every time we read and enjoy it.

Italy has, with Lo cunto de li cunti or Pentamerone by Basile, the most ancient, rich and artistic book of fairy tales, by mutual consent of the foreign critics who know this subject. (Croce, in: Basile, 1974; our translation)

So Benedetto Croce in 1925 introduced his complete translation of Basile’s collection, the first Italian one, which we still consider the most beautiful. An introduction by Italo Calvino enriched the 1974 edition of this text, but the Italian writer never read Basile’s text: “Moreover," he wrote, "I am dealing with a book of Basile-Croce, because I know the first only through the second one” (ibid., vol. I, p. V; our translation).
Introducing his collection Italian Folktales, published in 1956, Calvino had written:

Basile's work resembles the dream of a hideous Neapolitan Shakespeare, obsessed with the horrible, so that ogres and witches are never enough, with a taste for the tortuous grotesque image, where the sublime mingles with the coarse and the sordid. (Calvino 1968, vol. I, p. 7, our translation; see also Calvino 1980, p. XV)

By his analogy with Shakespeare, Calvino seizes the amazing linguistic skill of Basile, which reaches one of its peaks in this fairy tale's operation of the three little artist animals. He moves to perfection his juggler tools, mingling scatological, sexual, military languages, and then he ends his amazing performance with some lines of Francesco Petrarca. The amazing writer provokes laughter and admiration, bringing on the stage the infinite resources of the language.

Tale of Tales is a Neapolitan work, and its language is today nearly incomprehensible even in Neaples, but its influence on the Italian and European fairy-tale imagination testifies to its universal value. As for the adjective hideous, we agree with Italo Calvino on condition that we think as hideous the human being too. From Basile's baroque point of view life usually mingles together the sublime and the coarse. Moreover, we can feel Basile close to us thanks to his irreducible complexity, which reflects our weakened identity, because no salvific ideology looks now able to ensure us.

We can feel ourselves exiled and delegitimized like Nardiello, when we undergo the narcissistic injury coming from the disillusion about our possibility to master ourselves. The ego is not master in its own house, as Freud said.
But sometimes it happens that in our exile - namely away from the house of our origin - we can fall in love with a doll, like the main actant of Pooavola Doll, or with three little animals artist. We can face the risk of following our own desire, which seldom agrees with common sense, and is unavoidably divergent from our social and parental injunctions.

The dreamer writer Giambattista Basile did not get a throne like Nardiello, nor did his art make his life easy. However, he endowed his creature, The Tale of Tales, with the magic of art, and it has been travelling through time and space, beyond borders that he could not even dream.

To acknowledge the magic of art means understanding that art is the offspring of human culture, and the only kind of immortality to which a human being can aspire. But it means also giving up the illusion to master one’s own creature, be it a little or great artistic work. (See also: Lake of Generation)

In art alone, it still happens that a man, consumed by his wishes, produces something similar to the gratification of these wishes, and this playing, thanks to artistic illusion, calls forth effects as if it were something real. We rightly speak of the magic of art and compare the artist with a magician. But this comparison is perhaps more important than it claims to be. (Freud, 1912-13, p. 96)

Thanks to this magic, the tales by Basile, and Nardiello, the princess, the king and the merchant, live happily forever after, together with the guitar-playing cockroach, the dancing mouse and the singing cricket. (AG)

What makes this tale so peculiar, is that the story of the maiden dressed up as a man, travelling around the world, is framed by another story, the tale of the parrot who acts to keep the main actant - a queen - faithful to her king. Here we have a tale within another tale, which comes to the oral Italian dialectal storytellers from a faraway oriental origin (other versions of this fairy tale were collected in Sicily, Tuscany, Sardinia and Calabria). We do not know which road this fairy tale covered, but we know an Indian collection called Śukasaptati, or Seventy tales of the Parrot existing since the 12^th century. There is a tale encompassing others tales, a frame story: a parrot tells stories for seventy nights, to keep at home his master’s wife, so that she cannot be unfaithful to him. Some scholars think that Śukasaptati was known in Europe since the Middle Ages, other scholars think that it entered in the European tradition some centuries later. How could the Piedmontese folk storyteller in the 19^th century know a fairy tale told in an unknown language? We do not know other subsequent variants of this parrot's story, the charm of which is intriguing. What is more interesting for us is that it gives evidence to one of the main magic virtues of the fairy-tale genre: to cross any boundary of time, space, language, and culture. They live and flourish thanks to the pen of cultivated writers as well as to the speech of illiterate people, giving us a various and abiding pleasure. 

The parentage of our dialectal fairy tale with the Indian collection concerns only the frame story, since the tale told by the Piedmontese parrot has nothing to do with the Eastern ancient collection. It tells of a king’s daughter who is left quite alone, without her beloved doll, and is left to wander the world. She happens to cure many cursed princes before finding the prince who is lovesick for her.
Leaving aside the parrot's frame story, The Lost Doll is in the northwest quadrant of the Map of Succession, because the main actant is a girl and her journey starts after the loss of her father. Because the princess lacks any mean of survival, her fairy tale begins with the injunction of the Marsh of the Dereliction. The female main actant is robbed of everything, because her father’s enemies killed him, and her doll too is lost. This doll was made exactly like her, with her same features and height, so that she, having no mother or siblings, could have a playfellow. In her dereliction, when nobody can take care of her and she cannot take care of anybody, the poor princess embarks for a long journey. She will finally find her doll and somebody to love: her doll is in the closet of a prince, who had fallen in love and was lovesick with her from the very moment he had seen her doll.

Let us now notice something about this fairy tale, travelling together with the princess disguised as a man, who tests a feminine aptitude: to take care of others. Along her way, she treats ill princes cursed by underworld actants, mainly female ones. The princess can always find out the evil troubling them, watching all the night long over the bewitched prince, then going down a dark and deep place, which may be an underground prison or a cave opening under the prince’s bed. Therefore, this story tells that the princess herself needs to gain experience of the deep link between life and death, to understand how to care the others before, finding her lost doll - her own self. As soon as she discovers it, she meets her prince, and their happy wedding means the par excellence happy and fruitful alliance. We already said that the prince is already in love with her, since when he saw her image, her doll. She has no chance to meet him before achieving her journey, during which she tests herself in the powerful plot of illness and recovery, life and death. When the princess has experienced her power to care male illness, she finds herself. (CC)

A magic Tunafish is caught in the web of Madmatt, the main actant of this fairy tale. Its injunction is the Marsh of dereliction, since the activity of the male main actant depends on his poverty: he is not able to provide a living for himself and his mother. You can see their fairy tale in the northeast quadrant, because Madmatt has a male magic helper - the Tunafish - and a powerful antagonist, the king.

The Tunafish is a male helper - let us remember also the phallic symbolism of the fish -, and his aid comes from another world; through this encounter, Madmatt can fill the lack of his father, who has passed away. The confrontation with the king then represents Madmatt facing the human law, which he violated magically impregnating the little princess Juliet.

This fairy tale starts with a prank that repeats itself every day, when Madmatt, coming home in the evening, screams at his mother to take all her containers out to the front of the house so that he can fill them up with his catch. But he never catches anything. Then he makes funny faces, sticking out his incredibly long tongue, triggering the laughter of the little princess, who appears at the window of her castle, angering Madmatt.

Then, one day, Madmatt, who is ugly, clumsy, and unable to fish anything, catches an enormous tuna, and he sets off towards home, happy to bring with him such a big fish. But the fish speaks, asking Madmatt to release him and arguing that eating him he will not be satisfied in the long run, but only once. Since Madmatt does not free him, the Tunafish promises also to give him a lot of fishes, and to make all his wishes come true.

Then Madmatt gives up his need of food and puts the Tunafish back in the water, and following his words he fills up his little boat with so much fish that it nearly sinks. For the first time the poor lad tells the truth, when he  screams that he is bringing a big catch, but his mother, for the very first time, finally refuses take all her containers outside. But her love for him quickly wins her good sense, and the poor woman hurries up to prepare cans, pans, and dishes that Madmatt finally fills up. Nevertheless, the little princess goes on laughing, and Madmatt does not simply rail against her as he used to do: he runs to the shore and calls the Tunafish, who appears in the blink of an eye, ready to fullfill his desire. Madmatt asks the fish to make the princess pregnant with his offspring, and this is said and done.

When the father king learns that his little daughter is pregnant, he does not believe her innocence and sentences her to death. However, the queen intercedes on behalf of their daughter, persuading the king to wait for the birth of the child. When the baby is born, he is so beautiful that the king decides to wait another year, hoping to find a way to find his unknown father. Then he invites all the men of the city for his grandson's birthday, hoping that the child will naturally recognize his father. But the baby does not go to anybody, until he tries to reach a door, behind which is Madmatt, who is feeling too ashamed to enter the hall. When he is ordered to come in, the baby smiles at him and throws his arms around Madmatt's neck. The dismayed king orders to put her daughter, Madmatt and his grandson into a barrel, and throws them into the sea, where they are supposed to quickly die.  

This is a recurring motif, which reminds us of the Greek myth of Perseus, conceived by the princess Danae with the supernatural love of Zeus. Danae's father, the king,  puts her in a casket together with his grandson and throws them into the sea. The king is trying to oppose his destiny: it has been prophecized that his grandsn  would kill him.

The King is dead, long live the King. The flow of the generations following each other includes ageing and death together with birth and growth. The ancestor, the king, tries to dodge this law of life, sentencing to death his descendant, but he inevitably fails. Let us notice that in all myths and fairy tales newborn babies who are abandoned like Perseus always find somebody who rescues them, so that they can grow up beautiful and strong. Moreover, they leave their adoptive parents and return to their unknown parents. There is no chance of dodging one’s destiny, like in our Greek myth, because Perseus accidentally kills the king, without knowing that he is his grandfather.

Instead of the death of the parent who abandoned them, fairy tales tell that the old king abdicates to give the throne to his descendant, finally recognizing her/him as his worthy successor, as happens in the tale The Cockroach, the Mouse and the Cricket.

Let us now go back to our fairy tale, which was first written in Venice by Giovan Francesco Straparola, then retold by Giambattista Basile in his collection. The little princess, Madmatt and their child are in the barrel with “a basketful of bread, a flask of good Chianti and a crate of raisins and figs” (e-book, p. 37). While Madmatt eats and drinks as if nothing bad could happen, the princess gets upset and is busy calming down their baby, giving him some figs. When she asks Madmatt how he can be so indifferent to her and their baby’s suffering, which he caused, and to their mortal danger. Madmatt answers that they are not in danger at all, because he has a magic helper who will make all his wishes come true. Then the princess asks him to share his magic helper with her, and when the Tunafish appears, the princess asks him to lead them to safety on an islet and to change Madmatt into a beautiful wise youth. Then she asks for a wonderful palace, surrounded by an amazing garden with a tree of golden apples.

Leaving aside the tree of the forbidden fruit, which Adam and Eve were quick to taste, we remember in the Greek mythology the golden apples of the garden of the Hesperides. Let us remember also another garden visited by Ulysses, belonging to Alcinous, the happy king of the Phaeacians: every tree of this wonderful garden would always give its fruits, in any season. Thinking of Arabic fairy tales, we remember the trees laden with precious stones of every colour that Alaaddin sees in the underground garden where he is looking for the magical lamp. (See also, about this, Adalinda Gasparini,1993, pp. 81-97).

Some years later, the king and the queen, the parents of our princess, were oppressed by melancholy after having lost their only daughter. So they decided to leave for a pilgrimage by ship, and when they saw that amazing palace, shortly after their departure, they went ashore to visit it. When their daughter, Madmatt and their child welcame them, they did not recognize them.

Then, while the king and the queen were admiring the wonderful garden, looking at the magic tree with three  golden apples hanging from its branches, the princess played a trick on her father, with the help of the Tunafish. A golden apple fell into the clothes of the king, and the princess then asked all the guests to prove that they did not steal the precious fruit. When the golden apple fell from his clothes, the dismayed king proclaimed his innocence. Princess Juliet first pretended not to believe him, and then she said:

I should believe you are innocent about the apple which fell from your  bosom,  but  you  didn't  believe  that  your  daughter was innocent when her child was born!  Now  it  must  be  known: I'm Juliet,  unhappily thrown into the high seas with Madmatt and the child,  all of us condemned to a cruel death by  you". With tears in her eyes Juliet revealed all: "This is the innocent child, born out of no fault of mine, and this is Madmatt, who has become very wise thanks to the power of a fish named Tunafish". (e-book, p. 60)

A child is the offspring, a bud, a fruit, a gem: the Italian word gemma means both gem and bud, by which the plant reproduces itself. Birth is a mystery, both for believers, who know the reality of a magic pregnancy from the Gospel or from the Hindu poem Mahabharata, and for non-believers, who ought to call mystery what they cannot control and master. The king did not give credit to his daughter when she affirmed her innocence; if the queen and his counsellors had not held him back, he would have sentenced her to death as soon as her pregnancy would have become visible. Therefore, he lost his daughter, and his melancholy is the penalty for having attempted to halt the flow of succession. Check. Checkmate, from the Persian shāh māt, means the king is dead. Then a new king ascends to the throne, another game, and another story can start. The defeat of the king is the same defeat of all parents, when they discover the radical alterity of their children, when life takes them away from their control, putting an end to the absolute mastery that they had until that moment exerted.
All parents have the right and the duty to be masters of their little children, but no pedagogical or psychoanalytic theory can ever spare them the narcissistic injury of the parting, when their offspring, becoming a tree with its own fruits, takes a shape that never coincides with her/his parents’ picture of the tree. A coincidence would be the total failure for children, because it would be a negation of the difference. Without this difference, that makes unique every human being, no subject could take shape.

Then the parent’s mirror breaks into pieces, because the chain of the generations lasts thanks to this discontinuity; it is a game of vital conflicts that parent's minds can understand only if they acknowledge and sustain this narcissistic injury. They can come to terms with it only after a long and hard reflection.

In the tale of Madmatt, the king, representing the law, cannot understand magic, just as the king in the fairy tale The Cockroach, the Mouse and the Cricket, because they ignore or condemn whatever goes beyond their mastery. On the contrary, Madmatt puts the Tunafish back into the sea, giving up his first chance to satisfy his and his mother’s hunger: he gives credit to the unrealistic promise of the speaking sea creature. In a similar way, the little princess, in a barrel shaken by the waves, gives credit to Madmatt who is telling her that his magic friend will easily lead them to safety. Then she saves herself together with him and their child, conceived with the magical help of the Tunafish. We find other amazing magical pregnancies, e.g. due to a sea-dragon heart, in the fairy tale The Enchanted Doe. Nevertheless, is there not something magical in every birth, in every child who resembles a man and a woman coming from different families, and ancestors of which every memory is lost?

The art of storytelling, as well as every other art, requires a work of symbolization, looking for nourishment beyond realism: a fabulous nourishment:
 

But what shall we say to those who have such compassion on my hunger that they counsel me provide myself bread? Certes, I know not, save that, whenas I seek to imagine in myself what would be their answer, an I should of necessity beseech them thereof, to wit, of bread, methinketh they would reply, "Go seek it among thy fables." Indeed, aforetime poets have found more thereof among their fables than many a rich man among his treasures, and many, following after their fables, have caused their age to flourish; whereas, on the contrary, many, in seeking to have more bread than they needed, have perished miserably. (Boccaccio, Day the Fourth; p. 319)

Princess Juliet enriches her father by showing him how Madmatt might look guilty even while being innocent, and life flows again thanks to this ending, with parents who now meet their lost daughter once again. She, the only heir of the king, gets what is due to her, ascending to the throne together with Madmatt. This may happen after events full of risk and magic: living happily forever after in a fairy-tale and in our memory. (AG)

We would now point out some features of our new tale, which with pleasure we found in the film Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh and produced by Walt Disney Pictures (US, 2015).
The first feature concerns the role of the prince. In our tale the prince is very determined: he imposes his choice on his royal parents, who then help him to look for his beloved.

Marian Roalfe Cox, a member of the London Folklore Society, published in 1893 a book which is very important for anyone who wants to study the story of Cinderella. She collected three hundred and forty five versions of this tale, divided into five broad types. One of these types includes Catskin and Donkey Skin (see also, for another short account of Donkey Skin, the Castle of Forced Love). In this type, the main male actant, who is a determined prince, falls in love with a girl who wraps herself up in a dirty animal skin, after catching a glimpse of her beauty while she is wearing her wonderful secret gowns. He recruits the help of his royal parents to reveal her for what she really is and happily marry her.

In his film, Kennet Branagh depicts a wilful prince, determined enough to find his own way to inherit his father’s throne. He loves and respects his father, but nevertheless he faces up to him, reasserting his wish to marry the girl he once met while hunting, instead of the princess that he should marry for reasons of state.
The second feature concerns the animals that the fairy turns into the crew of the coach which will take Cinderella to the ball. In the film directed by Branagh, there are two green lizards who turn into valets. These animals do not appear in the first Disney version (1950), while we find them in the story told by Charles Perrault and in the illustrations by Arthur Rackham, where there are six lizards. The English artist devotes to the lizards a particular space, thoroughly drawing their transformation and ornating the cover and some inside pages with many little lizards. We love this little animal, and it recurs in our version as well, except for the fact that we have chosen to turn only one little reptile into a valet. 
This little animal is a leitmotiv in our app Cat Cinderella, appearing on the home page and in many inside pages; the lizard with its symbolic value stresses Cinderella’s side connected with the cinders of the fireplace. Before the ball, Cinderella's only friends are mice, traditionally regarded as dirty animals, and lizards, little scary reptiles. The presence of these dirty or scary animals may seem like a detail, but it characterizes the tale of Cinderella, who moves between two sides, the darkness of the cinders and the brightness of her beauty. To remove from these animals any uncanny (unheimliche) features, means reducing one of the two sides of Cinderella, thus impoverishing the total significance of the fairy tale.

In addition, Branagh, like Rackham, gives the lizard-valets a particular space, making them into funny characters that however hold an uncanny feature. As men, they have a translucent greenish skin, yellow green gloves that recall little paws and sharp animal teeth. We see one of them catching a flying bug with his long snappish tongue, just before midnight, when Cinderella returns to the coach.
The third and last feature concerns the end of our story, after the happy wedding. We tell that the fairy, seeing that everything was successful, flew away on her broom, and in our last illustration she merges into the moon. We drew our inspiration from the lovely ending of the 16^th century fairy tale Pooavola Doll,

The Pooavola doll, when it saw the luxurious nuptials of the two sisters, and how everything had come to a happy issue, suddenly disappeared. And what became of it no man ever knew. But I guess that the Pooavola vanished, just like it is in the usual habit of the phantoms.  (Pooavola Doll, e-book, p. 75)

Kenneth Branagh gives his Cinderella a kind of closing formula, that he does not draw from Disney's old version. He entrusts the fairy with the task of ending the story, and the fairy is now blue like the sky that fills the last shot of his film. With the fairy and the sky, a sky we drew from Rackham, we composed the last image of our app-tale and of our e-book. (CC)

See also the app-tale (Cat Cinderella) and the e-kamishibai of this fairy tale, which are available via its fairy tale map.
We introduced Rackham's lizards in this page too, where they are holding up the notice coming soon.

If you search “Cinderella” on Google, you get nearly 100.000.000 results. If you then write “Cinderella shoes”, you get 13.400.000 results, and you can buy Cinderella slippers or shoes made of plexiglass, to wear on your wedding day or at a masked ball. Looking for “Cinderella wedding” we get 16.000.000 results, with websites offering a Cinderella gown, a pumpkin coache and slipper-shaped wedding favors (accessed 28/05/15).
Among the very special shoes realized under the name of Cinderella, let us remember the sandals with diamonds displayed at the 2002 Oscar Night, whose value was 2.000.000 dollars (see, http://ohtopten.com, Stuart Weitzman, Cinderella slippers; accessed 13/05/16). In 2015, the Walt Disney Company collaborated with nine luxury designer shoe brands, to make nine glass slippers that women could actually wear, with a price ranging from nearly 1.000 dollars to little more than 3.000  (see http://www.fashiongonerogue.com, Nine designers recreate Cinderella’s glass slipper; accessed 13/05/16). The costume designer Sandy Powell realized together with Swarovski the crystal shoe  that we see in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, when the prince holds it or when it is on a velvet pillow. The lead actress, whose feet are not little at all, wears a pair of leather shoes whose shape is the same as the crystal one, which are made to look transparent like glass thanks to special effects. (See http://www.instyle.com, Cinderella’s Costume Designer Spills the Secrets Behind Making This Fairytale a Reality; accessed 13/05/16)
Other objects emerge from fairy tales into reality, as everyday objects, gadgets or toys; let us think of Aladdin’s lamp, fairies’ magic wands, gingerbread houses like the one eaten by Hänsel and Gretel. If we were to add together all the real objects coming from fairy tales, their number would however be smaller than the total number of different versions of Cinderella slippers.

We know they are a symbol, an important one; the perfect correspondence between shoe and foot reminds of the ring-finger correspondence, in engagement and in marriage, like in a perfect erotic intercourse. The women’s love for shoes tells of their wish to grant a privileged care to the lower side of their body. The foot, with its mobility and the possibility to move oneself that it gives, compensates for the lack of the male organ being the bodily signifier of the phallus. High and very high heels – the top stylists in 2015 only  created very high-heeled Cinderella glass slippers – stress the worth of the foot as a strong and stiff appendix.
Branagh’s film, with its two versions of Cinderella’s shoe, a small crystal one and a bigger pair of leather ones, whose transparency depends on special effects, is the last representation of the contradictory complexity carried by this successful motif from Perrault onwards.
The motif of a shoe found by a sovereign, who falls in love with its unknown owner, dates from the 6^th century b. C., when a precious slipper stolen from the beautiful Rhodopis dropped on the head of Pharaoh Amasis II. The ancient Chinese fairy tale of Ye Xian (9^th century) tells the whole story of Cinderella, including the little shoe, which is here a golden sandal, so small that it could only fit the foot of the main actant, who has the smallest feet in the realm. The ruling ideal of very small feminine feet induced the Chinese custom to apply painfully tight binding to the feet of young girls to prevent further growth, even causing them lifelong disabilities. This ideal of beauty could correspond to the wish to reduce the size of the feminine phallic side, to reassure her future husband about his own supremacy.
Nonetheless, in the story told by Branagh’s film, which is the most recent version of Cinderella’s fairy tale, as well as in our app-tale Cat Cinderella (2014), the size of the slipper is not important. There are some versions of this story, even folktales, telling that the precious slipper did not fit women who tried it on, because their foot was larger or smaller than Cinderella's. Cinderella’s slipper became very small from Perrault onwards: Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre (1697). Nevertheless this size is not the smallest one, like in the Chinese ninth-century tale. The king’s announcement said: the prince would marry her whose foot this slipper would fit (il épouserait celle dont le pied serait bien juste à la pantoufle. Perrault, Cendrillon, Wikisource, accessed 13/05/16) and we only read of her stepsisters’ feet that were too big. Cendrillon is asked to try on the slipper right after her two sisters, and is helped by the royal chamberlain, and putting the slipper to her foot, he found that it went on very easily, fitting her as if it had been made of wax. (Il fit asseoir Cendrillon, et approchant la pantoufle de son petit pied, il vit qu'elle y entrait sans peine, et qu'elle y était juste comme de cire. Ibidem). A little foot, as soft as wax, combines the Chinese ideal, which at all costs wanted to reduce the woman’s phallic appendix – the fetishists have no doubts about this interpretation of the foot – with the reassurance that she would never try to vie with her husband.
The Grimm Brothers, whose Cinderella is titled Aschenputtel, treasured both Perrault's Cendrillon and Basile’s first version of the tale, Cinderella Cat, (La Gatta Cennerentola), and they stressed the part of the shoe-fitting test. Here the shoe is made of gold. In this version, when the prince comes to Ashenputtel’s house, her two stepsisters seize the shoe and go off to try it on with their mother. Since it is too small for the elder one, her mother suggests her to cut off her big toe, “Cut off your toe. When you are queen you will no longer have to go on foot” (Hau die Zehe ab: wenn du Königin bist, so brauchst du nicht mehr zu Fuß zu gehen. Aschenputtel oder Das gläserne Pantöffelchen, Spiegel online Kultur-Project Gutenberg, accessed 13/05/16). The stepsister cuts her toe and wears the golden shoe, but the prince, looking at the blood dripping from the shoe, discovers the hoax and sends her back. The younger stepsister has the same problem with the golden shoe, and she follows her mother’s analogous advice, “Cut a piece off your heel. When you are queen you will no longer have to go on foot” (Hau ein Stück von der Ferse ab: wann du Königin bist, brauchst du nicht mehr zu Fuß gehen. Ibidem) Again, the prince understands he has been swindled from the blood, and brings the second stepsister back too. He then insists on seeing another girl, even though the stepmother says that she is too ugly and dirty for him. Ashenputtel is finally revealed to the prince, and the golden shoe fits her perfectly.
Bruno Bettelheim interprets the stepsisters’ blood dripping from the shoe as menstrual blood, so the fact that Ashenputtel’s foot is not bleeding would mean that she had not yet had her first menstruation, and this undoubtedly proves her virginity. Bettelheim’s interpretation reminds us of the loathing for menstrual blood, the poisonous substance par excellence, the opposite of spermatic fluid, which was supposed to be the most noble and precious bodily substance (see also, about this medical mythology, Storytelling and Science). Following the phallic meaning of the foot, we would think that the performance that female and male actants play around the foot/penis would become impossible as soon as there is a real amputation, cutting the woman’s toe or heel.
Cinderella’s stepmother urges her daughters to castrate themselves, saying that if they become queens they will not need to walk, like the poor Chinese girls whose feet were deformed to keep them to a small size. A woman should give up her autonomy – standing and walking on her own feet – to become a queen; this is a sacrifice of her autonomous/phallic aptitude, so that she will attribute it to her husband and her sons. This is a way to get married, but the story of Cinderella tells quite a different story.

Let us now remember the gesture by which a male hand puts the glass slipper on Cinderella’s foot, presented in every film following Disney’s 1950 movie. The director presents a male character, the prince or one of his servants, who kneels down to allow Cinderella to perfectly fit her foot – representing a phallic appendix – with its receptacle – a symbol of the female genital. There is something so charming and precious in the fact that a real slipper could reach the very real price of two million dollars. The suitor acknowledges the performance of the female main actant, who could hold both the content and the container; moreover, he chooses her precisely because she can act this out. The prince thus legitimizes the female desire not to be captured by the male, and to be able instead to escape from his capture.
  We can identify Cinderella and her ancestors through this perfect correspondence between shoe and foot, constantly told of since ancient  Egyptian and ninth-century Chinese tales. The king who recognizes Cinderella through the slipper test, represents the acknowledgement of her completeness, and personifies a male desire for a woman whose femininity does not depend on any amputation. This male subjectivity does not depend on a lack of the female one.

Let us now look at 17^th century Neapolitan Cat Cinderella (La Gatta Cennerentola), which is the prototype of all the modern Cinderella variants. We see that the main actant does something terrible, something which is still present in some folk versions, but disappears from Perrault onwards. The main female actant's mother is dead, and her father, who is a prince, loves his only daughter very much, but has remarried a woman who does not please her step-sister. The girl has a sewing teacher who is always kind and affectionate with her, and suggests her how to get rid of her stepmother. If the girl follows her instructions, she can then persuade her father to marry her sewing teacher, getting the ideal mother she longs for. Following her teacher's advice, Cinderella drops a chest’s cover on her stepmother’s neck, and after her death, she persuades her father to marry the sewing teacher, who promised to grant all her desires.
Cinderella is an actant who refuses to see herself and her mother as whole human beings, idealizing herself and demonizing the stepmother who frustrates her step-daughter instead of satisfying her. The childhood's totally good mother - existing just in her little daughter's idealization - fades when the girl grows up, and her place is taken by a faulty mother, who can not - or will not - please her. Therefore, Cinderella turns against her a boundless aggressiveness. Basile’s 17^th century story represents this hatred through a matricidal action . After the new stepmother's arrival, the girl enjoys one week of absolute satisfaction, followed by a situation much worse than the previous one.
The female actants demanding an ideal parent or partner end up in the throes of their opposite: a cruel mother, a beast or monster husband, decay, segregation, humiliation. Cinderella's ex-teacher brings home her six daughters – from Perrault on reduced to two stepsisters – who take everything away from her, even her place in the heart of her father. The little motherless daughter of a prince, who required a made-to-measure mother, and without any hesitation killed her first stepmother, has now to move from the hall to the fireside, and leave her sceptre to take up the spit. She loses the exclusive love of her father, who is now interested only in her stepsisters, and eventually she looses her own name.
She has no other place than the hearth, where she always gets dirty with dust, so, they call her Gatta Cennerentola (according to Basile), Cendrillon in France (according to Perrault) Ashenputtel in Germany (according to the Grimm Brothers), Cenerentola in Italy, and Cinderella in English. Curiously, her English name sounds like the name she was given in the 18^th century Bolognese translation: Cindrella.
The matricide committed by Cinderella has been understandably removed, but her name and look keep the colour and the substance of penance and grieving, the same colours as the cinders that we see in Catholic Churches on Ash Wednesday. It is the first day of Lent, the time of penance lasting until the Resurrection of Easter.

Regarding the footwear, there is an important difference between the most known version and Basile's one. In the time of the great writer of fairy tales, the Neapolitan women wore lo chianiello, a fashionable very high overshoe, which could increase a woman's stature by one handbreadth and a half. This is one of the things that the enamoured king says when he speaks to the chianiello that slipped away from the foot of the unknown beauty.
 

Thou wert the covering for a white foot, and now art thou the pulled of this blackened heart; by thee stood thy fellow, one handbreadth and a half taller, who is the tyrant of this life of mine ; and by thee groweth so much sweetness in my soul, whilst I gaze upon thee and possess thee ! (Cat Cinderella, e-book, pp. 62-63)

The first footwear of Cinderella had nothing to do with glass, golden slippers, or sandals that we now imagine for her feet. What is very important is that Gatta Cennerentola's chianiello has no particularly little size: Basile simply tells us that nobody could put it on, until the king placed it near the one to whom it belonged: just as iron runs to the magnet, the chianiello flew to Cinderella’s foot, fitting it perfectly.

Sixty years after the publication of the Tale of Tales, Charles Perrault retold Basile’s story, entitling it Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre. Could Cinderella have gone to the gala ball, where the crown prince – a king in Basile's version - was going to choose his wife, with just slippers on? Could the Fairy Godmother have dressed her like a queen without changing her house shoes? Of course not. These slippers are indeed made of verre, glass slippers in English. Regarding the material, they hypothesized a misspelling on Perrault's side who would have given Cinderella pantoufles, slippers made of vair, that in French sounds like verre. To go to the ball wearing pantoufles/slippers made of vair, a very precious fur, could be sensible, but what does it mean to wear glass ones? With regard to this issue, prominent figures like Honoré de Balzac gave their opinion, opting for the fur, even if this rational argument leaves unsolved the pantoufles/slippers issue, still unsuitable for a gala ball.
As far as I know, nobody thought that Perrault had used a literal translation of the Neapolitan chianiello, which in Basile’s time meant that fashion overshoe, but usually means slipper, a shoe to wear at home. Other personalities, like Anatole France, observed that if it is possible for a pumpkin to become a coach, it is just as possible for Cinderella to dance with glass slippers: as transparent as spring water, as rock crystal and as diamond. (See also: Wikipedia, Controverse sur la composition des pantoufles de Cendrillon; accessed 14/05/15).
The mythology of Cinderella’s slippers maintains its great charm, inspiring nowadays the best stylists in the world, and it depends on the symbolic meaning of the slippers, about which we have already written above. But it enriched itself through this incongruity of Perrault: glass is a material impossible to wear and walk in, even less to dance in, and the slippers (pantoufles) are shoes for the house, that Cinderella wears when she finally leaves the darkness to shine in front of her royal suitor.
Basile lead his Gatta Cennerentola to enchant the king on the promenade, Perrault leads her to the gala ball and assures us that she made a grand entrance in the royal hall, and then …she danced so very gracefully that they all adired her more and more  (Elle dança avec tant de grace qu’on l’admira encore davantage. [Perrault, Cendrillon).

Perrault introduces another detail becoming an integral part of the tale, telling that at midnight Cinderella’s gorgeous gown, golden coach and its crew would change back into rags, pumpkin, mice and green lizards. In Basile’s tale Cinderella grows a tree from the magic date that the dove of the fairies sent her with golden tools to cultivate it; when the date palm is as high as a woman, a fairy comes out of the tree asking her “What wilst thou?”. Cinderella wants to go to the promenade but her stepsisters should not know it. Then a crowd of dressmakers, jewellers and make-up artists comes out from the date palm together with a beautiful horse, to dress her up like a queen. When she is ready, the fairy teaches her a magic formula to get undressed, which she can say, changing the last words, when she will again decide to get dressed and go to the promenade. Nothing forces her to leave the promenade at a certain time. There is no encumbrance forcing Cinderella or stating how many times she could ask the date palm to get dressed and undressed.