Pitrè's opera.

Joseph Pitrè was formidable in collecting and cataloging the last gleam of Sicilian folk world and not just in Sicily. Before radio and television leveled almost every cultural differences. Like well noted by scholars and etnoantropologists, Joseph Pitrè approached the topic with his own eyes and the respect of a son for the father.

Sicily, its history, the Sicilian people and peasants, their uses and customs, songs, stories, proverbs, parties and whatever came from that world was put under observation; matches were drawn and therefore the similarities and obvious differences with the traditions of other places.
All the research was conducted by Giuseppe Pitrè and his staff according to the demological canon, in other words carrying out of the studies the living reality, the living voice of the people and of the illiterate peasants.

His fatigue conflue in two books between 1870 and 1871 "the Library of Sicilian folk traditions", published between 1871 and 1913 in twenty-five volumes, including among the various sections the singing traditions of nursery rhymes, love songs and protest songs, both tied to the seasons and the culture, the games, the proverbs, the fairy tales, the celebrations etc. One can even find there folk medicine, legends, the custom in the family life, the domestic life of Sicilian people, the traditional practices of agriculture, the habits either religious or superstitious, all kind of Sicilian oral culture including the famous tales of the storytellers.

But a limit was imposed on the selection of the various traditions, being discarded those indecent, the coarse ones, those that dealed with erotism, despite the fact that they were an important strand in the landscape and flourishing of all traditions.

Giuseppe Pitrè and many other scholars of Italian folk traditions were back to rejectionism, as if their account could undermine the whole edifice of popular traditions, as if this could sound like a lack of respect towards the "homeland" Sicily or the "homeland" of every region.

Giuseppe Pitrè had a romantic approach to the folk traditions, while in his more lucid thinking one finds an evolutionary concept of culture, in such a way that "primitive" is opposed to "modern", and "popular" is opposed to "cultured".

This attitude to folk traditions comes from Europe and primarily is due to the Grimm Brothers's fairy tales seen as "fallen myths" coming from the prehistoric India and the Arii's ethnos.
These two German scholars saw in folktales "the pieces of an ancient religion of the race, kept by the vulgar, as to rise again in the glorious days when, chased Napoleon, is awakening the German conscience" (I. Calvino, Italian Tales, px) . With such a background, it was rather difficult to collect and publish collections of erotic tradition.

German Krauss Federico Salamone, director of "Anthropophyteia", a magazine about erotic traditions, experienced himself badly such a conditioning, being denounced to the Court of Berlin (Raffaele Corso, Retrieved from the magazine of Anthropology, vol.XIX, Fasc.I-II). No doubt that both Pitrè and his illustrious colleague Salvatore Salomone Marino have anyway collected these erotic traditions, but only very recently have been published Pitrè's "Indecent Riddles" and Marino's "Waggish Stories".

In fact, the fairy tales and folk stories have concerned all the people of all ages and all social classes, crude, refined, cultured and uncultivated. The folk tales, for millennia, have moved the various cultures and subcultures and sometimes have found huge narrators and interpreters.
When this happened, when a story was so very well performed, it became a standard with many variants.
The story, the plot of the story continues to live and transform, brought by the oral tradition, although in recent centuries it has been almost crystallized through the writing. Nevertheless, no literary authors who had taken over the fairy tales before the brothers Grimm ever had narrated them as if they were intended only for children.
Giovanbattista Basile, Charles Perrault were not directed only to children but also to adults.

Pitrè thinks sometimes that people consider the tales as a fiction for children as was usual in cultured classes (Aurora Milillo, preface to "Novelle e Racconti popolari Siciliani by Giuseppe Pitrè"). The Grimm's "Tales of the hearth" is tipically a book of fiction for pupils. Giuseppe Pitrè filters his selection of stories guided by "common sense". He discards the indecent, but does not disdain those who talk about the habits of the people and peasants.
His repulsion to indecence is obvious, but he can not fail to present the stories that allude lightly to the wit and intelligence of people that he admires. But the stories of peasants are the ones that he collects the most, people who live on the edge, oppressed by the needs and survive only for their deep attachment to life.

As says Cocchiara, the work of Pitrè has two aspects, one historical and one poetic, both reveal "a humanity alive and vibrant" for which he was convinced that the time had come to study with patience and love all the memories and traditions, with the precise goal to store them for posterity.
There came the creation of the Museum of Ethnography, where to gather all the materials and objects patiently sought in Sicily, as mentioned in the introduction, Museum that now is called by his name, Pitrè, housed in the dépendances of the Palazzina Cinese (Chinese palace), inside the Parco della Favorita in Palermo.

In 1890 he was called to teach demopsicologia (as he used to call the folklore), when he had already acquired fame and appreciation by the cultural élite of the time. In 1894 he already had published a bibliography of folk traditions in Italy, maintaining relationships with the most important scholars, especially in Tuscany.
A tireless scholar, lover of his land, he also wrote "Palermo hundred and more years ago", an untraceable precious volume, and essays on poet Giovanni Meli, and Wolfgang von Goethe in Palermo, another on the Divine Comedy, collecting folk tales even in Tuscany.

His collaboration with Salvatore Salomone Marino went over through the years and together they founded in 1880 the most important journal of studies on the folklore of that period, "Archive for the study of folk traditions". He exchanged an extensive correspondence with scholars from all over the world. These letters are now preserved in a section of the ethnographic museum in Palermo, and they are still considered precious sources by the contemporary scholars such as anthropologst Antonio Buttitta.

For his merits and his fame, Pitrè was appointed Senator of the Kingdom in December 1914, when in America Editor Crane translated and published his works, especially the proverbs and the fairy tales, whose root is common to many people, as affirmed in a letter of his to Ernesto Monaci : "What a beauty, my friend! one must understand and feel the Sicilian dialect to understand and feel the exquisite fairy tale that I have managed to pick up to the mouth of one of my various storyteller. "

Let's highlight the beautiful pages dedicated to the stories of Giufà (a famous character he invented) and to the Sicilian folk festivals, so poetic are those about Christmas and the "Deads" (All Saints).

The works

     * Library of Sicilian folk traditions;
     * Sicilian popular tales, novels & stories 
     * Sicilian grammar - about the wise dialect spoken in Sicily, 1875
     * The stories of Giufà
     * The stories of Roy