The Stories and Plots

        The scripts for the Sicilian marionette performances came from works of literature and from folktales. Because marionette performances are in the oral tradition as well as part of the visual arts, liberties have been taken over the years with some aspects of the stories. But the main tradition of Sicilian marionette theater are the tales of the legendary Charlemagne and his foremost warriors, the Paladins.

        Charlemagne was King Charles I, an eighth century King and the Holy Roman Emperor who ruled over much of Western Europe. His driving motivation was the unification and Christianization of all those he ruled. To do this, much warfare was required and he was noted for his ruthlessness. His rule did not extend to the region now known as Sicily, though his armies did battle in parts of Italy. But that has nothing to do with why tales of Charlemagne became a staple of Sicilian marionette theater.

        In 1516, an Italian named Ludovico Ariosto published an epic called Orlando Furioso, which roughly translates to the madness of Roland, or the frenzy of Roland. It was a continuation of Orlando Innamoroto, or Roland in love, which had been written earlier by his countryman, Matteo Boirardo.  Both works took the Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) as a basis and inspiration. Roland was the nephew of Charlemagne, and the Song of Roland is the oldest surviving major work of French literature.

        Orlando Furioso is not a work of historical accuracy. It takes great liberty with geographic locations and introduces fantastic monsters and sorcerers and a creature called a hippogriff, which was a horse with wings and the head of an eagle. It had talons instead of forelegs. But the human characters are the same as those in the Song of Roland, and there are similarities in the plots.

Although this illustration from Orlando Furioso looks like Batman riding an eagle, it actually shows a warrior named Ruggiero riding a hippogriff through a mythical landscape.

These Italian epics, based on the earlier French epic, became the basis for nineteenth century Sicilian marionette theater. Why? Perhaps the violent history of Sicily plays a role. Sicily has been ruled by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Normans, Germans, and French, according to an article by Buffalonian Angelo Coniglio, found in a back issue issue of Per Niente newsletter. The history of Sicily is one of battle, where the skills of the warrior are prized along with the qualities of bravery and loyalty. This may have made it easy for the Sicilians to relate to the tales of the fighting Paladins.

Another factor is that at the time that the marionette theaters were growing in popularity, the ruling powers were becoming uneasy about crowds gathering among their subjects. Marionette performances featuring satires or contemporary political themes would have been particularly discouraged. But the tales of Charlemagne and the paladins satisfied both the Sicilian taste for drama and adventure and the ruling class requirement of 'safe' subjects.

A Source for Information

   

    I thought you might be interested in seeing where I found so much of this information about Salvatore Rizzo and his marionette theater. These scrapbooks were a Works Progress Administration project during the 1930s. Clerical workers who were out of work were paid by the government to sift through the library's collection of old newspapers, find and sort articles, and paste them into scrapbooks. There are about 200 of these scrapbooks in the collection and they are a tremendous resource for anyone curious about Buffalo life in years past. To see them, just go to the Central Branch at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, and enter the Grosvenor Room. That is the room with local history resources of all kinds. You will see the shelves of scrapbooks on your left as soon as you walk in the door. Be prepared to be swept away. There are scrapbooks about Buffalo's Foreign Population, Buffalo Homes, Buffalo Streets, Industry, Churches, even Buffalo Trees!

The Theater on Dante Place

     
           In this post I'd like to share what I have learned so far about Salvatore Rizzo's theater on Dante Place. For the sake of coherence, I'm going to refer to the street as Dante Place, even though it was named Canal Street at an earlier point in time.
        I found an interesting article in one of the scrapbooks held at the Central Library in downtown Buffalo. It was dated April 5, 1908 and appeared in the Express newspaper.

                                                                                                                                Courtesy Buffalo & Erie County Public Library

        Crystal Beach was a popular amusement park across the border in Canada, known to generations of Western New Yorkers, especially Buffalonians. To get there, many boarded the Canadiana, which docked not too far from Rizzo's waterfront theater in Buffalo. The author of the article above describes how to get to the marionette theater: 

"Turn into Dante Place on the right as you leave the Commercial Street bridge, then walk a little way along this street with its huddled domesticity and teeming shops and fruit stands, past crates of fowls and strings of onions, past doorways filled with children and easy-going men and women who carry on the Italian tradition of life in the open."

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/map_item.pl?data=/gmd380/g3804/g3804b/pm005430.sid&style=gmd&itemLink=D?gmd:2:./temp/~ammem_8vnc::&title=Buffalo,+Erie+Co.,+N.Y.+

             The old drawing above shows part of the Buffalo waterfront in 1902 At the upper left you can see a street running horizontally from left to right; it is labelled 'Canat' - it is supposed to say 'Canal.' This is the street that became Dante Place. If you follow this street heading to the right, you will see that it crosses Evans. One block further you see where LeCouteulx Street meets Canal Street, and that is roughly where Salvatore Rizzo's storefront theater was.

                  The writer goes on to describe how every seat in the little theater is filled nightly, and all the wall space taken too. There is the clash of swords and shields, and shouts of 'brava' from the all-male crowd, as the marionettes act out the stories of Charlemagne and his courageous knights. I like the part from the article above where the writer tells how Rizzo let him look behind stage, where rows and rows of marionettes "are hung aloft like so many Bluebeard victims." Salvatore Rizzo had over 75 marionettes, which gives one an idea of how intricate were the stories he told with them.

                  The most commonly given reason I found to explain why there were no women or girls at these performances was that there was often 'rough language' from the audience. That is a plausible explanation, but another factor is the Italian culture operating at that time and place. Little Italy in Buffalo, like the other Little Italy places across the country, was full of very recent immigrants whose traditions had not been worn away by life in the new world. Women did not go out and socialize in the evenings the way men did. According to a study by Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, a woman did not leave her home unchaperoned at that time, and husbands and fathers dominated family affairs. The marionette shows, with their emphasis on courage, honor, chivalry, and loyalty may have helped shape the Sicilian male's self-image.

                    Women weren't entirely absent from the theater, though. Salvatore Rizzo's wife made the little cakes and the lemonade that she sold at the shows. If any of my readers remember hearing about the theater or the marionettes, I'd love to hear from you! 

                    

Buffalo's Little Italy

Express, May 4, 1902                                                                                courtesy Buffalo & Erie County Public Library

       
         These young boys in Buffalo's Little Italy could very well have been among those who frequented Salvatore Rizzo's marionette theater. The brave marionettes in the performances who were always ready to do battle and fight for honor could surely have inspired these poses. Does anyone recognize any of the boys in this great photo?

          The Italian born population in Buffalo increased from 6,000 to 16,000 between 1900 and 1920. Italians represented 10% of Buffalo's foreign born population. They tended to settle near others from their village or town, thus there were four or five areas in Buffalo with heavily Italian populations. This blog is concerned with the Italians who settled in the waterfront area near Canal Street (later named Dante Place). Many of them were from the region around Palermo in Sicily. When people write of Buffalo's Little Italy, this is the area they are usually referring to.

          Family was of supreme importance here. Marriage was for life - so said the Catholic Church and so they believed. Family honor was taken seriously, and social life was intertwined with family life. Many of those who immigrated here were formerly agricultural workers in Sicily, most were illiterate, and usually they faced the challenge of a new language along with trying to find employment.

           St. Anthony of Padua Church played a large role in family and social life. It was the only Catholic church in the neighborhood until Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church was built in 1906. That church no longer exists; it was razed in the name of urban development in 1949. St. Anthony's is still here - it stands at 160 Court Street in downtown Buffalo.  Social clubs met at the church, along with labor unions when they came to exist. It was the place to celebrate births and marriages, and where funerals were held. There were parades and festivities to celebrate saint's days.

          Education was important to the newly arrived immigrants. I have read that it was the ambition of every family to have a doctor, a lawyer, and a priest. The public school in the neighborhood was School #2.

                                                                                                                            1910 Photo by Lewis Hines; Library of Congress

     How about it - are there any PS #2 alumni reading this?

Pupi Fratelli Napoli

        Since I obviously can't show one of Salvatore Rizzo's marionette performances, I have found one on You Tube from Sicily. I have read that there were three distinct marionette traditions in Italy: from Palermo and Catania in Sicily, and from Naples. The marionettes from these regions are distinguished by size and by style of manipulation, whether from the top or from the sides. These are the Napoli brothers from Catania, descendants of Don Gaetano Napoli, who opened his theater in in Italy in 1921. Salvatore Rizzo had been operating his American theater on Dante Place for almost twenty five years by then!

The marionettes that Salvatore Rizzo owned and used look similar in size to the ones we see here.
   
        Rizzo's shows were probably not as elaborate as this one. There are at four strong men performing here; if you watch them instead of the marionettes, you will see them wiping sweat from their brows, and note that they are all pretty muscular! Rizzo would have had his sons helping, and would have spoken all of the lines himself. I have not been able to find out whether he had music or not, but I did find an article from the newspaper that described the excitement at Rizzo's performances that was created during battle scenes. Rizzo would stamp his feet on the hollow boards behind the stage during the clash, the same as these Napoli brothers do. The audience would shout for their hero, and there would be the sound of clanging shields and swords. All of Rizzo's shows were in Italian as tradition dictated. Even non-Italian speakers (of whom there were none in Rizzo's theater) can get caught up in the excitement of a Sicilian marionette performance, as you can see.
       For those with shorter attention spans or less patience, the excitement of battle starts at 4:26 :)

The newspaper article from Buffalo also notes that the marionettes usually needed repairs after each performance!

       Has anyone been to Italy and seen one of these performances in person? I'd love to hear from you!

Immigration and Italian Culture in Buffalo

       
            According to an article I saw on the Library of Congress website, Italians were forced to leave their old world homes because of poverty, crop failures, and taxation. Many of them found their way to Buffalo, New York. In 1900, these were the cities with the largest number of Italian immigrants, in order: New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Newark, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Jersey City, Buffalo.

           Between 1900 and 1920, Buffalo's population of Italian born citizens rose from 6,000 to 16,000. Buffalo was and is very much a city of immigrants - in 1920 Italians accounted for 10% of Buffalo's foreign born population, and 7% of her population overall. I found these figures in a book by Virginia Yans McLaughlin called Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo 1880 - 1930. 

            Italian society in the old world was distinctly family oriented, and things were no different when they came to Buffalo. Even if a whole family could not immigrate together, the first arrivals scrimped and saved so that they could send for those left behind. The insularity of some Italian villages was repeated here so that it was not unusual to find many families from the same village living in the same tenement block. The fabric of the neighborhood was woven of family and friends. Just as in Italy, one's nuclear and extended family was the hub of one's social life. They helped each other find work or a place to live, and they formed mutual aid societies to carry each other through especially hard times.

              Italian women rarely left their homes to work. That was the man's job. Her sphere was the home; it was her responsibility to hold the family together. The book I mentioned quotes an Italian proverb: "If the father should die, the family would suffer; if the mother should die, the family ceases to exist." Women's honor and chastity were important, and to be protected. Girls were taught at a young age how to cook and do the marketing; they were often expected to care for younger siblings. Everything women did was done within the neighborhood.

Photo courtesy Buffalo & Erie County Public Library

The only boys present in the scene at left are very young. The older boys may have been at school - education was important to the immigrants - but just as important was helping in any way they could to feed the (usually large) family. I imagine bananas were a rare treat then.

Young boys sold newspapers, shined shoes, acted as messengers, sold apples - in short, they helped in whatever way they could and contributed their earnings to the family pot.

This photograph from the Library of Congress was taken in Buffalo in 1910 by Lewis Hines as part of his 'child workers' series. It is called 'Italian newsies'.

Was there a newsie in your family? I'm always so glad to hear from readers.














references
Italian Immigration: The Great Arrival, Library of Congress, http://www,loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/immigration/italian3.html
McLaughlin, Virginia Yans. Family and Community: Italian Immigration in Buffalo, New York, 1880-1930, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.

Salvatore Rizzo

   
     
         I first learned about the Dante Place marionette theater while I was doing some research on a totally different subject. That is what I love about research - opening one door leads you to - more doors! The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library (Central Branch) has a collection of almost 200 scrapbooks in the Grosvenor Room. These were a Works Progress Administration project during the 1930s. They contain clippings from Buffalo newspapers dating from about 1900 onward, and they are a treasure trove of primary documents. Much of my information about Salvatore Rizzo came from these scrapbooks.

          Salvatore Rizzo was an Italian immigrant who came to Buffalo from Palermo sometime around 1900. According to a 1930 census I found at Ancestry.com, he would have been about 38 years old at the time of his arrival with his young family. Salvatore Rizzo settled his family on Canal Street. (The name of the street was still Canal; in 1909 it would be changed to Dante Place to reflect the new majority ethnicity of the neighborhood and to distance the street from its unsavory reputation as Canal Street.)

        Like most of the Italians who arrived in Buffalo between 1880 and 1920, Rizzo's background was agricultural. He found work as a fruit peddler, which again was a common occupation for new Italian immigrants. But there was something that set Salvatore Rizzo apart: he came from eight generations of pupari back in Palermo. Pupari is the plural form of puparo - 'puppet master' in Italian. His father had begun teaching him the skill and the art of the marionette performance as a boy, and he had worked in his father's 'teatrino', as his father worked with his grandfather before him. It was a family tradition, as Salvatore's son Frank proudly told a  Buffalo Times reporter in 1932. "My father can trace his ancestry eight generations and find that they were all great masters in marionettes. It was the great show in Italy."

        The Rizzo marionettes were hand carved from Italian wood by generations of the Rizzo men. Salvatore had about 75 puppets, many of which he had carved and painted himself. He also fashioned stage sets, painted scenery, and designed costumes for the marionettes.

        Salvatore Rizzo started his marionette theater in a tiny storefront on Canal Street (hereafter referred to as Dante Place), and every night after work he put on plays there. His audience crammed into the tiny storefront to see tales of Charlemagne and his Paladins come to life on the handmade stage.

          Does anyone remember hearing older relatives talk about the marionettes or the shows or the theater? I would love to hear your comments, as always.

This 1921 photograph from the Buffalo Express shows Salvatore Rizzo on the left, his son Anthony on the right, and three of their magnificent marionettes. They are standing in the rear of 106 Dante Place. Photo courtesy of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.

References: "Buffalonians Discover Marionette Theater", Buffalo Express, April 5, 1908. Buffalo's Foreign Population, Vol. 1,p. 146. Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, Grosvenor Room.

United States Census, 1930. http://www.ancestry.com
Grosso, Thomas X. The Erie Canal's Western Terminus-Commercial Slip, Harbor Development, and Canal District. http://www.eriecanalharbor.com/pdf/72BuffaloGuide.pdf

From Canal Street to Dante Place

  Back during the mid 1850s, when the Erie Canal emptied into Lake Erie, there was a street on the waterfront in downtown Buffalo called Canal Street. It was a tough and dangerous place, frequented by thieves, prostitutes, brawlers, and gamblers, studded with bars and brothels, teeming with every variety of vice. Thirsty sailors and canal men with pay in their pockets roamed the area and were both victims and predators. This map from 1901 shows Canal Street where it started at Commercial Street.

Image courtesy of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library

               When this map was made, the atmosphere of Canal Street had been in a state of transition for a decade or more. What happened? Several things: the railroads had begun to make inroads into the canal trade. Irish immigrants who could move to better neighborhoods were moving. And, most importantly, during the 1880s Italians began immigrating in ever increasing numbers to the United States, forced from their homes in the old county by high taxes, agricultural failure, and poverty. Early in the new century, so many Italians had settled in the area that the name of the street was changed from Canal Street to Dante Place. It was also called 'the Hooks', the Canal district, and Buffalo's Little Italy.

                       Many Italian families in Buffalo can trace their beginnings to this area of the city. I would love to hear from any and all with stories about the neighborhood, whether they have ever heard of Salvatore Rizzo and his marionette theater or not. Your comments are always welcome!