Alessandro Napoli

“The curtain rises on a medieval courtyard. Two knights in shining armor are conversing in flamboyant Italian.” These words open the chapter entitled “Orlando Furioso: The Flower of Chivalry,” included in the now classic Art of the Puppet by Bil Baird published in 1965 for Macmillan in New York and translated into Italian as Le marionette: Storia di uno spettacolo (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1966). Baird devotes this chapter to puppets that bring to life a chivalric repertory. To be more precise, however, the author focuses primarily on Catanese-style Opera dei Pupi as he came to know it in the New York theater of Agrippino Manteo and his family.

Baird's chapter—which I read while a university student writing my thesis, La Marionettistica dei fratelli Napoli: permanenze e mutamenti nell’Opera dei Pupi di tradizione catanese—marked my first encounter with the name and history of this Catanese puppeteer who immigrated to America. From that moment, there arose a long series of questions, many of which today are answered by the study that I have the honor and joy of presenting in this foreword. Baird's chapter title is placed at the bottom right of a double-page photograph featuring four puppets of the Manteo family: a Saracen, Ruggiero dell’Aquila Bianca, Bradamante, and Rinaldo. From a structural point of view, these puppets belong unequivocally to the Catanese tradition: most notably, they have rigid legs without knee joints as well as a fixed right-hand fist holding a sword, and they are meant to be manipulated by handlers (manianti) standing on a bridge (‘u scannappoggiu) raised with respect to the puppet theater stage and hidden by the backdrop. Yet some details in the shape of the puppets’ armor are very different from the typical Catanese shape codified by the great coppersmith masters Giuseppe don Puddu Maglia and Sebastiano don Bastianu Zappalà. The helmets without neck guards and the oval shields of Bradamante and Rinaldo with the lion insignia over an oblique bar, moreover, make those puppets look very much like the traditional puppets of Palermo. In short, Baird's chapter and the photographs published in it ignited in me a profound curiosity about Papa Agrippino Manteo and his puppets.