Reading Diary B: Italian Popular Tales

The stories in the second half of the unit Italian Popular Tales are a little bit darker than the first half. The first half was filled with fun and engaging fairy tales. Each of the stories had a happy ending. The second half of this unit is not like that. The stories do not all have a happy ending. I still really like them though. They are really interesting and a lot of them have religious backgrounds.

Pilate looking about as creepy as the story
would suggest (Happy nightmares to you)

One story that really stayed with me was the story An Incident in Rome. This story kind of gave me the creeps honestly. It was pretty cool at the same time. It definitely had an air of mystery all throughout it. The image I had of the carter coming across a man deep in the ground, reading over and over a piece of paper and not responding when he was spoken to was so weird and creepy. I thought it was even more mysterious when he finally answered and wrote his name on the carter's back. The idea that the carter came out of the cave looking like he had aged fifty years was really kind of scary. It indicated to me that the man in the hole had done something bad, and that going down there had almost sucked the life out of the carter or something... really creepy. Of course this story ended up having a religious background when the man in the hole was revealed to be Pilate. This story was so weird, but it really stuck out in my mind because of all of the mystery that surrounded it.

I also read The Story of Crivoliu. This story was also weird. Within the first two lines there was a mention of incest... gross. I kept reading however, and was really intrigued. It ended up being a story with a religious background as well. When Crivoliu found out the circumstances of his birth, he being a man of faith, left his home of his adoptive parents and went to go do penance for his parent's sins (incest, seriously, gross). Long story short Crivoliu ends up becoming the pope, and his parents come to confess their sin from long ago, and Crivoliu says that he is their son, has spent many years doing penance for them, that they are forgiven, and should come live with them. Really nice and pope like of Crivoliu, but honestly kind of weird. The whole basis of the story was just so weird that it stuck so heavily in my brain. This unit definitely took a strange turn from the Beauty and the Beast story.