TALES MERRY AND WISE

These folk tales from the Adriatic shores of Italy don't measure up to the standards of Old Italian Tales reviewed below. Brief as they are, these chronicies of man and beast and the contretemps of both, achieve a uniform standard of tedium. We have not seen the illustrations by Kurt Werth; they may redeem some of the short-comings of this collection. The exuberance, the genre vitality and the folk art feeling one has a right to expect from such a collection are absent.