Sicily of the Paladins of France

In the Sicily of the mid-nineteenth century, the Theater of Puppets explodes in a prodigious way, with its particular characteristics that make it unique and unmistakable. This type of theater is one of the heirs of oral storytelling, which dates back to the Bible and Homer, traversing the centuries, particularly the medieval ones, where it flourishes with the jester theater. The protagonists are the Puppets, which do not have strings like marionettes: the puppeteers move them with rods, to the rhythm of shields and swords, against the backdrop of naive and colorful scenes. The Opera of Puppets, as it is later called, tells us the deeds of Charlemagne and his Paladins of France, first among them Orlando, drawing inspiration from the Carolingian cycle and the poems of Ariosto. But it is legitimate to ask: what are the Paladins of France doing in Sicily and why were their stories so loved and represented? It is believed that the Carolingian epic arrived in Sicily with the Normans in the 12th century. At first, it was mainly the storytellers who passed down the memory of a chivalric epic in which battles were fought for high ideals, such as religious faith, homeland, and honor. Starting from the 19th century, popular storytelling used the puppet, dressing it in forms that referred to sixteenth-century iconography. The heroes represented, the Paladins indeed, exalted the moral values of which they were champions and for which they were willing to fight and die. These themes had great success especially in the nineteenth century, thanks to the romantic-reformist culture, and made the characters of the Paladins live among the people between myth and true history. Their battles also staged the confrontation between European and Islamic civilization, of which Sicily has been the theater for long historical periods. For centuries, the Sicilian Puppets, skillfully animated by generations of puppeteers, have constituted the only source of education and one of the few occasions for leisure and entertainment for the humbler classes, for the poorly educated or illiterate people, although later they were also appreciated by the bourgeoisie. They also constituted "a sign of contradiction and resistance to the logic of resignation and the worst, which is of so much culture and literature of the 'defeated'" (Theater of Sicilian Puppets of the Pasqualino Brothers). The puppeteers tell their stories by improvising and acting. They tell as it was once told, when the narrator spoke surrounded by a circle of wide-eyed listeners and believed in his tale. The puppeteers tell stories of rebels. They tell the tale of those who fight against a tyrannical and incomprehensible power, and somehow manage to win. A tale. A Sicilian tale.