STRAPAROLA, GIANFRANCESCO

born c. 1480, , Caravaggio, duchy of Milan died after 1557 Italian author of one of the earliest and most important collections of traditional tales. Straparola's Piacevoli notti (155053; The Nights of Straparola) contains 75 novellas (short prose tales) that were later used as source material by William Shakespeare, Molire, and others; it introduced into European literature 20 folktales, among them Beauty and the Beast and Puss in Boots. Straparola's tales, drawn from many sources, soon became famous throughout Europe. Using a technique borrowed from Boccaccio's Decameron, Straparola set his stories within a frame. Each one is told on a successive night by a party of men and women relaxing at Murano, a suburb of Venice. Little is known of Straparola's personal life.