The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947): The Paladins of France in America

Building on her seminal books such as Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato: An Ethics of Desire (Associated University Presses, 1993), The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure (University of Toronto Press, 2004), and The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto (University of Toronto Press, 2013), Jo Ann Cavallo continues in this work to uncover the broader significance of Italian Renaissance chivalric literary culture.The ethnographic vein of Cavallo's exacting literary and cultural historiography, which has shed new light on folk traditions that dramatize narratives such as the Maggio epic of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, extends fruitfully in her new book to the popular puppet theater of Sicily, l'opera dei pupi. Cavallo does not, however, focus on insular traditions but on a unique Siculo-American case study, the dramaturgical work of Catania-born Agrippino Manteo, who successfully headed a Sicilian marionette theater on Mulberry Street, in the heart of New York City's Little Italy, from the late 1920s to the late 1940s. Cavallo effectively documents the social and cultural reception of the Manteo theater with testimonials from both the Italian-language press and the broader community, including renowned theater practitioners such as Remo Bufano, Tony Sarg, and Paul McPharlin. The theater's life cycle within the Italian-speaking community is directly linked to the spectators’ changing linguistic background, as language loss eventually led to the theater's closing. However, the impact of competing forms of popular entertainment deserves more investigation, as recent scholarship has shown that traditional arts such as puppetry can travel across media boundaries and continue to exert their presence.The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo marks a pivotal moment in the study of Italian puppet theater, viewed on a broad chronological and transnational horizon. More immediately, this is due to the philological and historical contributions of Cavallo's meticulous investigation, which cogently integrates a wide array of sources, including interviews with heirs of Agrippino, newspaper articles from the time, notebooks and variants of the scripts, literary source texts, previous scholarly accounts, and novel photographs. The comprehensive nature of Cavallo's study will be invaluable to scholars of Italian American culture, theater history, and literary culture. For example, the presentation here of new visuals and textual evidence now allows us to address a wide range of previously unanswered questions regarding, for example, the kind of puppets and props utilized in this theater, the function of the script before and during the performance, the intertextual genesis of the scripts, the place of poetic invention in the dramaturgical creative process, roles played by family members, and so on.As Alessandro Napoli notes in his foreword, Cavallo's latest book succeeds in providing the first systematic study of a Sicilian puppet theater located outside of Italy. This has, in Napoli's assessment, two important ramifications: (1) to illustrate not only the life of cultural and literary codes within the medium of puppetry but also the ritualistic significance that such identity reconfirmation had for a diasporic audience; (2) to restore Agrippino Manteo to the history of this art form, also by showing how he followed the practices of the Crimi school of Catanese pupari known for its erudite relationship to literary sources and the attention given to lyrics (xvi).The book is organized into two parts. The first part describes the history of the Manteo theater across generations and provides an overview of the script's material and cultural history, while the second part presents a selection of scripts analyzed and translated by the author. In part 1, a full chapter is devoted to recounting Agrippino's early years, apprenticeship, and migration to Argentina and New York, the establishment of the theater, and the unfolding of the family legacy in Little Italy and beyond. The second chapter is dedicated to the scripts: their literary sources, especially Giuseppe Leggio's Storia dei paladini (1895–1896) and its subsequent expansions; a careful explanation of the organization of the notebooks with annotated scripts vis-à-vis source texts; a discussion of the scripts composed by Agrippino himself; the method of composition of the scripts; annotating practice by Agrippino and his son Mike; and other salient characteristics.The collection of eight scripts presented in part 2 covers iconic moments of the chivalric imaginary: The Arrival of Angelica of Cathay in Paris, The Duel between Astolfo and Gradasso di Sericana, The Duel between Orlando and Agricane di Tartaria, The Grand Council of Agramante di Biserta, The Enamorment of Bradamante and Ruggiero, The Madness of Orlando, The Voyage of Astolfo to the Moon, and The Battle of Three against Three in Lampedusa. Each script, admirably translated by the author, is thoroughly introduced and analyzed against various Renaissance epic poems. The volume also contains a generous apparatus of appendixes that provide essential contextual information needed to navigate the production of Manteo's theater and undertake further investigation. Indeed, the practical value of Cavallo's groundbreaking work becomes apparent because the archive of Agrippino Manteo contains 265 extant plays. Now, thanks to Cavallo's comprehensive presentation, sharp critical toolkit, and impeccable modeling, scholars can inaugurate fresh research in Italian American puppeteering.Cavallo's work exemplifies a rare capacity for enriching meticulous philology with a broad, well-developed cultural and historical context, enhanced by the author's concise yet evocative writing. In addition to its groundbreaking contribution to the understanding of Italian puppet theater and this chapter of Italian American culture, Cavallo's study also serves more broadly as a springboard for research on the impact of generational and diasporic processes on the transmission and evolution of artistic traditions and literary memory. Indeed, the grafting of diasporic concerns onto the study of the rich humus of epic culture offers much food for thought to future scholars in both humanities and social sciences, especially when considering globalized expressions of the epic imagination.

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