Sicilian Puppet Theater

Sicilian puppet theater

Jo Ann Cavallo (Columbia University )

Places: Italy.

The Sicilian Opera dei pupi is a form of prose theater that dramatizes primarily chivalric narratives using large wooden puppets with full armor, swords, and shields. The puppets weigh an average of twenty-two pounds in the Palermo tradition and sixty-five pounds in the Catanese tradition, and they are manipulated from above by means of iron rods. These characteristics distinguish the Opera dei pupi from other forms of teatro di figura traditionally practiced in Italy, such as the marionette, light-weight puppets supported by strings, and the burattini, or hand-puppets, both of which present varied, primarily comic, stories outside the context of chivalry.

Puppet theater can be found throughout the world from Northern Europe to Indonesia and is attested to in Sicily since the fourth century B.C.E. (Xenophon, Symposium). The concrete origins of the Opera dei pupi tradition, however, are a matter of speculation due to scanty documentation prior to the early nineteenth century. Readers of Cervantes’ Don Quixote may remember how the ill-fated knight mistook puppet theater for reality and attempted to save the puppet Melisenda from the Moors. Whether or not the Italian Opera dei pupi came from Spain (or from Naples, as some sources indicate), it is documented on the island in the early 1800s. Sicilian puppeteers appear to have transformed the art form by creating puppets dressed in decorative metallic armor and capable of intricate movements. Although it was also successful elsewhere, in particular Rome, Naples, and Modena, the Opera dei pupi achieved its greatest popularity in Sicily during the course of the nineteenth century. The eminent Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitré (1841-1916) counted twenty-five puppet theaters in Sicily in 1884, with nine in Palermo, three in Catania, and the rest spread out throughout the island. Significantly, nineteen out of the twenty-five companies had originated in Palermo (“La letteratura cavalleresca popolare in Sicilia,” 340-41). Performances occurred in teatrini or small theaters which, outside of the big cities, were often set up inside rented warehouses, and itinerant puppet companies generally remained in each place about a year.

The Opera dei pupi was the preeminent form of cultural expression for working-class southern Italians and Sicilians, yet its subject matter was nothing less than the masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature. Henry Festing Jones, who traveled throughout Sicily with Samuel Butler, found it remarkable that the popular puppet theaters of the late 1800s were giving life to the elite chivalric stories of the Renaissance: “It is as though in England the cab-drivers, railway porters and shop-boys were to spend evening after evening, month after month, looking on at a dramatized version of the Arcadia or The Faerie Queene” (82). He remarked, moreover, that the Sicilians’ irrepressible passion for chivalric matter was more easily satiated by going to the puppet theater than by dusting off volumes of epic poetry: “The Sicilian, however, no matter how uneducated he may be, has an appetite for romance which must be gratified and, as it would give him some trouble to brush up his early accomplishments and stay at home reading Pulci and Boiardo, Tasso and Ariosto, he prefers to follow the story of Carlo Magno and his paladins and the wars against the Saracens in the teatrino” (81-82). Yet as Ettore Li Gotti points out, chivalric works by Andrea da Barberino, Pulci, Boiardo, Cieco da Ferrara, Ariosto, Tasso, and others continued to be published and read in Sicily from the Renaissance through to the modern period (109). The Englishman also did not seem to be aware of the fact that a nineteenth-century prose compilation of these same works (and other lesser-known ones), Giusto Lo Dico’s Storia dei paladini di Francia [History of the Paladins of France], had become both a sensation among the reading public and the primary source for the plays performed in the teatrini.

Lo Dico’s unprecedented undertaking of retelling of the vicissitudes of Charlemagne’s legendary paladins in one linear narrative stretching from the time of Orlando’s father Milone to beyond the battle of Roncevaux filled almost three-thousand pages. The first edition, published in biweekly installments of forty pages between 1858 and 1860, was a huge success among the public (in Palermo there were more than 3000 subscribers from all social classes and age groups according to Giuseppe Pitrè [350-1]). A second four-volume edition came out in 1862. Its popularity near the end of the century was such that Giuseppe Leggio (1870-1911) published a new edition in 1895-96 with episodes relating Charlemagne’s birth and youth taken from Andrea da Barberino’s Reali di Francia. Thanks to a series of prequels and sequels added in the following decades, the narrative timeline eventually stretched from the conquests of Alexander of Macedonia to the period of the Crusades.

Through Giusto Lo Dico, the puppet tradition combines rather seamlessly various phases of the career of the legendary Roland (italianized as Orlando) hitherto found separately in medieval French and Renaissance Italian epics: his birth in humble conditions outside Rome, his remarkable prowess as a youth, his emergence into knighthood by rescuing Charlemagne and avenging his father’s murder, his infatuation with the princess Angelica of Cathay and descent into madness, and finally his inevitable death in the battle of Roncevaux. By recounting Orlando’s tumultuous life in one uninterrupted narrative, Giusto Lo Dico gives him a prominence rivaling classical heroes the likes of Odysseus and Aeneas. At the opposite end of the moral spectrum can be found the villain Gano and his treacherous clan, machinating against Charlemagne’s worthy paladins on several occasions and thus providing a rich background of animosity leading up to the final betrayal at the pass of Roncevaux.

La storia dei paladini di Francia was quickly adopted by pupari (puppeteers) as their Bible, since it provided an “authoritative” written version of the same stories that they were already dramatizing. Since the puppeteers could not stage the third-person narration directly, they created canovacci, or outlines, dividing each play into scenes indicating the setting, characters, action, and dialogue, along with any stage instructions. Part of the challenge in this process of adaptation was the need to transform an interlaced, episodic narrative into a series of individual plays, each with its own internal structure and unity. The Palermitan puppeteer Mimmo Cuticchio refers to a sequence of 370 plays in his family’s repertory while the Catanese-American Agrippino Manteo staged a cycle consisting of 394 plays in his New York City teatrino. (For the sources of Sicilian puppet theater, see Pasqualino, L’opera dei pupi; for specifically the Catanese tradition, see Napoli, Il racconto e i colori.)

An essential feature of Sicilian puppet plays are the ever-present battles. These are choreographed with precision so that the knights facing each other lunge and strike each other’s sword simultaneously. In the tradition of Palermo, they can also jump onto horseback from a standing position, remove swords from their scabbards and put them back again, and lower their visors. In the course of a battle, a shield can break into two, armor can fall, a knight can be decapitated or sliced in half. The movement of battles is symmetrical and repetitive, and fast and uniform rhythmic sounds are provided by the stomping of the puppeteer’s clogs on the floorboards. Music for in between the scenes was first provided by a violinist, and then by a roller or cylinder piano played by hand or a pre-set player piano. The puppet costumes and armature recall the illustrations in Lo Dico’s Storia dei paladini and other nineteenth-century installments, many of which were in turn taken from those printed in earlier editions of chivalric romance (Li Gotti, 11). The female knights, principally Bradamante, Marfisa, and the Dama Rovenza, wear the same armor as their male counterparts, but their faces express feminine beauty as well as strength. The Saracens are identified by the half-moon insignia on their helmets and on their rounded or oval shields, as well as by a curved sword, or scimitar. Their costumes are often colorful, especially those of sultans or kings, who sometimes have large and downward-curving mustaches. The principal knights on both sides are further identified by the insignia on their shields. Chivalric narratives sometimes involve demons, angels, wizards, monsters and various animals such as serpents, lions, and dragons, and all of these have found their way into puppet theater. The animals are typically fashioned out of papier-mâché.

Visual artwork has played an integral part in the Opera dei pupi tradition. Painted backgrounds are changed between scenes to signal a new location, but can occasionally serve to provide special effects, such as the breaking of an enchantment in the middle of a scene. These backgrounds typically depict forests and battlefields, as well as the interior and exterior of palaces, castles, and military fortresses. Painted posters (cartelli or cartelloni) advertising upcoming plays and explaining their plots developed two distinct styles in eastern and western Sicily. Whereas the posters in the Catanese style depict a single scene, in Palermo they are divided into six or eight illustrated blocks, with each one corresponding to one evening’s performance and accompanied by titles. A card saying “today” would be moved from block to block as the days progressed, and a paper was often attached with a more detailed summary of the plot. (The above-mentioned studies by Pasqualino and Napoli provide abundant color illustrations of the art.)

The enduring fascination with an art form that dramatizes battles between Christian defenders and Saracen invaders is sometimes linked to the island’s long history of invasion by foreign armies, while the ever-present theme of justice has been seen as a fictional compensation for the injustices inherent in the society itself. According to the puppeteer Mimmo Cuticchio: “the puppet theater became the place of people’s dreams, where they could imagine themselves free from outside invaders and free from the feudal servitude of their past” (Jenkins 10). The primarily male audience knew the characters and the action ahead of time and would be quick to interrupt and comment upon any mistake. Not surprisingly, they collectively admired the valorous knight Rinaldo, Orlando’s poorer cousin, and hated the traitor Gano. There are many anecdotes about how members of the audience would sometimes purchase the Gano puppet and then destroy it when a cycle was complete.

Puppet theater was so much a part of Sicilian life that Luigi Pirandello used the puppet as a symbol for the persona that each individual assumes in the course of daily interaction with others. As the character Ciampa explains in Il Berretto a sonagli [Cap and Bells]: “Pupi siamo, caro signor Fifí! Lo spirito divino entra in noi e si fa pupo. Pupo io, pupo lei, pupi tutti. Dovrebbe bastare, santo Dio, esser nati pupi cosí per volontà divina. Nossignori! Ognuno poi si fa pupo per conto suo: quel pupo che può essere o che si crede d’essere” [We are puppets, dear Mr. Fifi! The divine spirit enters inside us and becomes a puppet. I’m a puppet, you’re a puppet, we’re all puppets. It should be enough, holy God, to be born puppets this way by divine decree. But no sir! Everyone then becomes a puppet of his own accord: that puppet which he can be or he believes that he is] (Maschere Nude [Naked Masks], 2: 373).

Near the end of the nineteenth century, however, the puppet theater found itself competing with new forms of entertainment. In the 1890s Giovanni Verga wrote a short story about the vicissitudes of a puppeteer who tried to uphold the tradition against the onslaught of cabarets and bawdy shows. After his permanent theater closed, Don Candeloro “viaggiò per valli e per monti, come i cavalieri antichi, con tutto il suo teatro ammucchiato in un carro” [traveled through valleys and hills, like the knights of old, with his entire puppet theater piled onto his cart] until he was finally forced to adapt to the new tastes of his public (232). Fellow Sicilian novelist Luigi Capuana voiced his sadness over a profound transformation in his homeland that had led to the disappearance of many aspects of popular culture he had known as a youth: “Non li rimpiangevo per una specie di malintesa predilezione archeologica, ma perchè mi sembravano più belli, più buoni, più caratteristici di tutto quel che gli si è venuto sostituendo” [I didn’t miss them due to a kind of mistaken archeological fondness, but because they seemed to me more beautiful, better, more characteristic than everything that was replacing them] (137).

The moment of greatest crisis for Sicilian puppetry, however, came about in the 1950s. As television in the home, the post-war economic boom, and an unprecedented indifference toward local cultural traditions led audiences to abandon the Opera dei pupi, most pupari sold their puppets to collectors and were forced to seek their livelihood through other means. Yet the Opera dei pupi did not die out completely thanks to the efforts and tenacity of some puppeteer families, such as the Cuticchio in Palermo and the Napoli family in Catania, and to support from those who recognized its worth. Most notably, the late Palermitan physician and scholar Antonio Pasqualino and his wife Janne Vibaek founded the Associazione per la conservazione delle tradizioni popolari [Association for the Conservation of Popular Traditions] in 1965 and the Museo Internazionale delle Marionette in 1975, and the following year instituted an annual Festival di Morgana. Today the Museum continues to offer a permanent exhibit and a regular schedule of puppet theater as well as its annual festival. Another important annual puppet theater festival, La macchina dei sogni [The Dream Machine], was instituted by Mimmo Cuticchio in 1984 in honor of his father’s life-long activity. On May 18, 2001, UNESCO designated Sicilian puppet theater as an Oral and Intangible Masterpiece in the Heritage of Humanity.

Today’s pupari no longer play out the entire cycle of the Storia dei paladini in daily puntate, but perform a selective repertory for an audience of tourists and schoolchildren generally much less familiar with the subject matter. They have found it necessary to reduce the plot and simplify the dialogue, while extending the battle scenes. Boiardo and Ariosto supply the material for the majority of puppet plays staged today (whether via Lo Dico’s prose retelling or a return to the original poems). Representations, which used to last about two hours, have been reduced to one hour in length without pause. Music, still mostly popular tunes in vogue during the Opera dei pupi’s heyday, is either prerecorded or provided by a roller piano, although there has been experimentation with music on the part of some puppeteers from both Palermo and Catania.

The Opera dei pupi has undergone other substantial changes as it attempts to adapt to the new circumstances. Women traditionally played an auxiliary role, such as sewing costumes for the puppets and providing female voices during performances, especially in Catania. In Palermo, it was—and still is—more common for male pupari to speak female parts in falsetto. In recent decades, however, women have become more active as managers and, occasionally, puppeteers. From 1985-1995 Anna Cuticchio (sister to Mimmo) ran her own puppet theater, named Teatro Bradamante after the great female warrior and sister to Rinaldo. Thematic and ideological changes have also occurred as some puppeteers rethink the Opera dei pupi’s traditional backdrop of Christian-Saracen conflict to reflect the sensibilities of contemporary audiences. Mimmo Cuticchio’s company, for example, decided to no longer portray Saracens with negative characteristics after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in order to move away from confrontation based on ethnic and religious differences (Jenkins, 7 and 10). Indeed, one of his most recent productions, Aladino, is based on the Thousand and One Nights. Despite these and other changes, the deeper themes and moral values that the Opera dei pupi adopted from the chivalric epic remain intact. One can expect to find the struggle between good and evil as knights make choices, experience and fight against injustice, face obstacles, love, hate, suffer, and grieve.

The puppeteers practicing today, almost all figli or nipoti d’arte, have held out (or, in many cases, begun anew) against all odds, obstinate in their belief in the worth of their art form. Alfredo Mauceri (b. 1975), a puppeteer who, along with his younger brother Daniel (b. 1982), continues his grandfather’s puppet theater in Siracusa, puts it this way: “Sometimes we ask ourselves why we have chosen this vocation, in a historical and social moment that tends to develop and discover new horizons; the answer is simple, we love this art with the core of our being.”

Works Cited: Capuana, Luigi. “La Sicilia nei canti popolari e nella novellistica contemporanea.” Lecture delivered May 12, 1894. In L’isola del sole, 1894. Biblioteca di cultura mediterranea, vol. 1. Caltanissetta: Edizioni Lussografica, 1994. 113-139. Cavallo, Jo Ann. “Where Have All the Brave Knights Gone? Sicilian Puppet Theater and the Tuscan-Emilian Epic Maggio.” Italian Culture 19.2 (2001): 31-55. Jenkins, Ron. “Refighting Old Religious Wars in a Miniature Arena.” New York Times. December 9, 2001. 7, 10. Jones, Henry Festing. Diversions in Sicily. London: A. C. Fifield, 1920. Li Gotti, Ettore. Il teatro dei pupi. Florence: Sansoni, 1957. Lo Dico, Giusto. Storia dei paladini di Francia cominciando da Milone conte d’Anglante sino alla morte di Rinaldo. 1858-1860. 4 vols. ---. Storia dei paladini di Francia comincando da Re Pipino fino alla morte di Rinaldo. Title and content revised by Giuseppe Leggio in 1885. Catania: Clio - Brancato, 1993 (vols. 1-IX), and Brancato, 2000 (vols. X-XIII). Mauceri, Alfredo. I Fratelli Vaccaro. Un sogno chiamato “Opra dei Pupi.” Siracusa, Sicily: 2000. McCormick, John, with Alfonso Cipolla and Alessandro Napoli. The Italian Puppet Theater: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Napoli, Alessandro. Il racconto e i colori: “Storie” e “cartelli” dell’Opera dei Pupi catanese. Palermo: Sellerio, 2002. Pasqualino, Antonio. L’opera dei pupi. Palermo: Sellerio, 1977. ---. Le vie del cavaliere dall’epica medievale alla cultura popolare. Milan: Bompiani, 1992. Pirandello, Luigi. Il Berretto a Sonagli. Maschere Nude II, vol. 5 of Opere. c1958. Milan: Mondadori, 1978. 355-405. Pitrè, Giuseppe. “La letteratura cavalleresca popolare in Sicilia.” Romania 13 (1884): 315-98. Reprinted in Usi e costumi, credenze e pregiudizi del popolo siciliano. Vol. 1. Catania, Clio, n.d. 119-336. Verga, Giovanna. “Don Candeloro e C.i.” Tutte le novelle. Ed. C. Riccardi. Milan: Mondadori, 1979. 225-234. Vibaek, Janne. “Il teatro dei cavalieri,” La Sicilia ricercata: Arte popolare in Sicilia 1 (1999): 59-66.

Citation: Cavallo, Jo Ann. "Sicilian puppet theater". The Literary Encyclopedia. 16 January 2012. [http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=17676, accessed 13 March 2015.]

ISSN 1747-678X