You don’t spend 16 years giving orders to the biggest stars in opera without having an opera-size personality of your own. All that the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, Joseph Volpe, who retires at the end of the current season, lacks as a rival to Luciano...

You don’t spend 16 years giving orders to the biggest stars in opera without having an opera-size personality of your own. All that the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, Joseph Volpe, who retires at the end of the current season, lacks as a rival to...

In the following essay, Beckwith examines the sources of Calvino's Italian folklore.

In the following favorable review, LeGuin maintains that “one of the innumerable delights of Italian Folktales is its mixture of the deeply familiar with the totally unexpected.”

Stylistically [in "Italian Folktales"] the English is everything we would expect in a good translation of such a master as Calvino: colloquial but never corny, plain-spoken, economical, wry and flexible, and sometimes—like the best authentic folk-speech everywhere—stunningly lyrical, capable of turning (as at the end of the first tale, "Dauntless Little John") unexpectedly somber, moving. Even if this impression of the translation's probable accuracy should p...