The Chivalric Folk Tradition in Sicily: A History of Storytelling, Puppetry, Painted Carts and Other Arts by Marcella Croce (review)

Marcella Croce’s The Chivalric Folk Tradition in Sicily is a travel to Sicily through time. It is therefore a book for tourists of chivalric epic and Sicily, but it could also be a valuable tool for academic scholars from literature to anthropology, from social history to history of art and folklore, and a valuable inspiration or source for interdisciplinary research.

This book, composed of two other works by the same author available only in Italian,¹ offers something difficult to find in English: a rich and detailed portrait of the literary and historical origins of Sicilian puppet theater, of its life and decline, of its characters, singers, storytellers, and audience. It also examines the popular festivals and the typical art forms related to it, including playbills and especially the Sicilian painted carts, so colorful as to force the editor to insert color images in the book.

Croce’s account starts by tracing a slightly quick and generic trajectory of chivalric epics in Sicily from the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, up to the present. She then focuses on the oral tradition, highlighting the “osmosis process between dominant and subordinate cultures” (26), between “learned and popular literature” (24). Croce also takes into account the vehicles, promoters and performers of such a tradition—singers, normal storytellers, and blind storytellers (orbi)—up to Giusto Lodico’s History of the Paladins, the first canonization of the enormous corpus of oral chivalric stories circulating in Sicily, a real “Bible” (35) for singers, puppeteers and painters of carts. At the end of Chapter 2, Croce analyzes the influence of these chivalric tales, bequeathed and heard for years by the inhabitants of the island, on Sicilian language, and sheds new light on several words directly derived from such tales (idiomatic expressions, proverbs, toponyms, and family names).

In Chapter 3 Croce describes some Sicilian festivities and their chivalric-related celebrations: the carnival pantomime of “Mastro di Campo” (Master of the Field) that takes place, since the seventeenth century, in the square of Mezzojuso, in the Palermo Province; the “Dance with swords” and the “Parade of the Virgin of the Armies” (Madonna delle Milizie) that take place in Casteltermini, in the Agrigento Province, and in Scicli, in the Ragusa Province, both on the last Sunday of May; and finally the “Chivalric stories with drums and bells” in Monforte San Giorgio, in the Messina Province.

In Chapters 4 and 5 Croce presents in detail the puppet shows and a specific family of puppeteers, Girolamo Cuticchio’s family, still devoted today to this Sicilian traditional art form. Croce describes the structure, components, and audience of the puppet shows, and analyzes some main components of classic plots, with a particular focus on the legendary battle of Roncevaux. The description of the Cuticchio family then features short biographies of all the family members and a detailed history of their apprenticeships and of their role in the performances.

Finally, in Chapters 6 and 7, the ones that include most original material for American readers, Croce presents two art forms strictly related to the puppet shows and to the chivalric stories that inspire them: playbills of puppet theaters and the Sicilian painted carts, symbols of a Sicily and of a tradition that is disappearing. She describes the making of the carts particularly in depth, together with the work of sculptors, metal workers, and painters. Moreover, Croce even devotes attention to the world of cart drivers, merchants of raw materials (salt, sulfur or cement), vegetables or fruits, who sometimes even perform exhibitions, competing against each other in different ways, such as pulling their tied carts in opposite directions, or pulling extremely heavy loads, or extracting the carts from deep mud or sand.

After the conclusion, Croce adds an interesting appendix in which she presents the main characters of the puppet shows—Orlando, Rinaldo, Angelica, Gano...