"The Batital-Pachisi, or Twenty-five Tales of Baital is the history of a huge Bat, Vampire, or Evil Spirit which inhabited and animated dead bodies. It is an old, and thoroughly Hindu Legend composed in Sanskrit, and is the germ which culminated in the Arabian Nights, and which inspired the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius, Boccacio's "Decamerone", and the "Pentamerone".

This Italian collection of folk-tales now known as Il Pentamerone was first published at Naples, and in a Neapolitan dialect that kept it out of northern European tradition for two centuries, by Giambattista Basile, Conte di Torrone, who is believed to have collected them chiefly in Crete and Venice, and to have died in the 1630s. Originally it was called Lo Cunti de li Cunto (The Story of Stories, 1634). Published posthumously, it became known as the Pentamerone by 1674 and eventually influenced the form of fairytales in Europe. The frame-story is of a group of people passing time by sharing stories, as in the Decameron and other European collections of tales. The Pentamerone tells fifty tales over five nights.