Opera dei Pupi, Sicilian Puppet Theatre

L'Opera dei Pupi, the puppet theatre, emerged in Sicily at the beginning of the 19th century and enjoyed great success among the popular classes on the island. The puppeteers told stories based, in the majority of cases, on medieval chivalric literature but also on Italian poems of the Renaissance and on the lives of saints or of notorious bandits. The dialogues in these performances were to a great extent improvised by the puppeteers themselves. The two main puppet schools in Sicily, Palermo and Catania, are distinguished principally by the size and shape of the puppets, by the techniques for operating the puppets and by the variety of colorful stage backdrops.