Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. I had heard it so often positively asserted that modern Italy had no popular mythology, and no contribution of special versions to offer to the world's store of Traditionary Tales, that, while possessing every opportunity, I was many years without venturing to set myself against the prevailing opinion so far as to attempt putting it to the proof. A certain humble friend, however, used time after time so to impress me with the fancy that she had all the qualifications for being a valuable repository of such lore if it only existed, that I was finally led to examine her on the subject. She gave me a capital opportunity one day when, during a visit to a bedridden cripple whom she nursed, she was flapping the dust off the pictures and ornaments with a feather-brush according to the Roman idea of dusting. 'I never do any dusting, ' she said the while, 'but I always think of Monsignor Delegato dusting the altar of the holy house of Loreto. And now I think of it, he was not called Monsignor Delegato, but Monsignor Commissario. But every evening of my life while I was young and living at Loreto, I have seen him dust the altar of the Santa Casa at 23 o'clock, before they shut viup the church, saying a Salve Regina for the benefactors of the spot.' If she was so familiar with Loreto, I concluded, and had so noticed and remembered its customs, probably she was not ignorant of its Legends either, and I commenced my inquisition at once. I have not given her Legends of Loreto in the text because, being tolerably familiar, they were among those which could best be sacrificed to the exigencies of space. I gathered on that day, however, one version of S. Giovanni Bocca d'oro, with two stories of Padre Filippo: and her subsequent testimony concerning the crucifix of Scirollo came in usefully (pp. 193, 195) in illustration of the Legend of Pietro Bailliardo; but, what was precious to me above all, I gained the proof and earnest that there was certainly a vein of legendary lore underlying the classic soil of Rome, and that it only remained to find the means of working it. I first lazily set myself to hunt through the bookshops, new and old, to find any sort of collection of traditionary tales ready made; but only with the effect of establishing the fact that no Italian Grimm had yet arisen to collect and organise them, and put them into available shape.
