The emperor thus becomes doubly responsible for the ensuing tragedy, first by his reckless decision to attack a foreign realm for selfish reasons, and subsequently by his choice of Gano (Ganelon) as his messenger. Luigi Pulci’s late fifteenth-century Morgante acknowledges this nepotistic incentive when announcing Charlemagne’s plan to invade Spain. Some early Italian versions shifted the war’s motivation from the need to liberate Spain from Saracen rule, to Charlemagne’s desire to bestow a Spanish kingdom upon his nephew Orlando (Roland), with the paladin vowing not to consummate his marriage to Alda (Aude) until he could make her a queen.

Yet the story of the battle of Roncevaux underwent substantial changes before it first appeared on the puppet theater stage. The Frankish paladins’ spirit of sacrifice and devotion to king, God, and country thus lent moral support to military efforts against the “infidel” in Spain and the Holy Land. Refusing early on to call for reinforcements, the hero eventually succumbs alongside his companions and is taken to heaven, leaving his fiancée Aude to die of grief back home at the news of his demise, and compelling Charlemagne to return with his troops to avenge the rout with a definitive victory over the Spanish Saracens and their allies. In the ensuing literary tradition, Christendom was locked in inexorable conflict with the Saracen enemy because, as Roland famously says in an early twelfth-century version of the Chanson de Roland, “Pagans are wrong and Christians are right” ( Song of Roland l. It was of no matter that according to the historical record Charlemagne’s rearguard was actually attacked by local Basques as his army returned from fighting in Spain alongside Muslim (Abbasid) allies in 778. Locating the distant starting point of Sicilian puppet theater narratives takes us out of Italy and into the Pyrenees where, in the imaginary world of medieval Carolingian epic, Charlemagne’s rearguard, led by the paladin Roland, is ambushed by Spanish Saracens at the mountain pass of Roncevaux as a result of betrayal by the emperor’s treacherous brother-in-law Ganelon. This essay first outlines the principal chivalric narratives that found their way into traditional Sicilian puppet theater, and then turns to how today’s puppeteers are refashioning the stories for contemporary audiences.

Although Sicilian puppetry is often advertised as “folklore,” puppeteers are actively engaged in nothing less than dramatizing in a meaningful way masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance Italian (and European) literature. In addition to bringing puppet theater into my scholarly studies and teaching, I created a website (eboiardo) to make the chivalric matter staged in puppet plays (as well as in other performance and artistic traditions) more widely available to students and the general public. Twenty years and several trips to Sicily later, you could say I’m a bona fide opera dei pupi enthusiast. Although I hadn’t previously given any thought to this performance tradition, those three two-foot-tall puppets dangling in my living room proceeded to stare at me daily until I decided to go see for myself how Sicilian puppet theater brought to life the medieval and Renaissance poems that had driven my research since my graduate student days. But in the late 1990s, a friend presented me with Catanese souvenir puppets named Orlando, Rinaldo, and Angelica, and told me that Sicilian puppeteers were staging the same epic narratives that I was teaching at Columbia University.

History of puppetry