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!