Grazia Deledda’s “Nostra Signora del Buon Consiglio” (1899) is a literary fairy tale incorporating ethnographic and Christian elements. It may usefully be read through the lens of Cristina Campo’s essays on fairy tales (“Della fiaba,” “Una rosa,” and “In medio coeli”), because this critic continuously compares fairy tales with the discourse of Christian scriptures and mysticism. In addition to a traditional moral, the tale provides an example of what Campo terms “the loving re-education of a soul”: by practicing attention, Deledda’s protagonist acquires hope and the ability to see beyond the visible, and she learns to understand identity, including gender identity, through the careful interpretation of names and symbols.

1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Mazzoni, Cristina. ""The loving Re-Education of a Soul": Learning from Fairy Tales through Grazia Deledda and Cristina Campo." Quaderni d'italianistica 29 (2): 2009. 93-109. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v29i2.8458. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.