[cpound]

I can think of a couple of reasons the author of this article might say "Giambattista Basile ... was certainly not writing for children."

One is that Basile's use of language is just visibly more complex than Perrault--Mother Goose--who presented similar stories in simpler forms only decades later: e.g. Cinderella ("The Cinderella Cat"), The Fairies ("The Two Little Pizzas"), Puss in Boots ("Cagliuso"), and Sleeping Beauty ("Sun, Moon, and Talia"). In other words, if you compare the two, you find that some fairy tales really were written for children back then too, just not by Basile.

The other reason is maybe to warn that Basile's unexpurgated stories, e.g. in Nancy Canepa's translation, may be a surprise to 21st C. adults who've only read Perrault, Grimm, Andersen, etc., because they are not only dark or whatever--they are Rabelaisian, scatological, etc., offering some fun 17th C. cultural surprises even for adults. I don't know enough about 17th. C. Naples to have an opinion on whether Basile would have been OK with using the same language around young children--like, maybe or maybe not. I'd just note Perrault didn't, d'Aulnoy didn't, L'Héritier didn't, and so on only like 60 years later.