"This first English-language study traces the history of Italian puppetry from its evolution in the 16th century. Topics include: the golden ages of marionettes, glove puppets, fantoccini, pupi, and other forms; descriptions of episodic, dramatic performances known as rappresentanti figurati; and in-depth studies of two marionette companies, Turin's Lupi and Catania's Fratelli Napoli"--Provided by publisher.

With the advancement of cybernetics, avatars, animation, and virtual reality, a thorough understanding of how the puppet metaphor originates from specific theatrical practices and media is especially relevant today. This book identifies and interprets the aesthetic and cultural significance of the different traditions of the Italian puppet theater in the broader Italian culture and beyond. Grounded in the often-overlooked history of the evolution of several Italian puppetry traditions – the central and northern Italian stringed marionettes, the Sicilian pupi, the glove puppets of the Po Valley, and the Neapolitan Pulcinella – this study examines a broad spectrum of visual, cinematic, literary, and digital texts representative of the functions and themes of the puppet. A systematic analysis of the meanings ascribed to the idea and image of the puppet provides a unique vantage point to observe the perseverance and transformation of its deeper associations, linking premodern, modern, and contemporary contexts.

Sicilian puppet theater was the predominant form of cultural expression for working-class southern Italians and Sicilians from the early 1800s until the proliferation of television in the 1950s. This form of dramatic prose theater also flourished in diasporic Italian urban communities, bringing immigrants together for nightly performances of the same deeply cherished chivalric stories. Agrippino Manteo’s scripts, examined for the first time in this study, are testimony to the rich substance of the Paladins of France narratives dramatized on the traditional opera dei pupi stage. Even beyond their historical and aesthetic value, the alternating episodes of love, enchantment, adventure, and warfare invite us to relive the passion, heartbreak, excitement, and magic of knights and damsels from around the globe – from Europe to North Africa to East Asia – who share the stage with a host of wizards, fairies, giants, and monsters. This study reconstructs the history of the Manteo family marionette theater in New York City across seven decades and three generations, provides translations of eight selected plays and 270 extant summaries, and offers comparative analyses uncovering the creative process of adaptation from Italian Renaissance masterpieces of chivalric poetry to nineteenth-century prose compilations to Agrippino Manteo’s opera dei pupi dramatizations.

This book has puppet theater and marionettes as its main subject. The author, herself a puppeteer, has divided her work into chapters dealing with the history of puppets, the different types found throughout the world and so on.