Silent Knights, Living Stories: The Manteo Marionettes at the IAM

The Catanese-American puppeteer Agrippino Manteo brought countless characters from the Paladins of France cycle to life for Italian American immigrant communities in New York City, performing nightly from 1923 to 1939. From 1950 to 1989, his descendants crafted new stories for wider audiences featuring some of the cycle’s most beloved heroes. Today, over thirty Manteo marionettes – including Carlomagno, Gano, Rinaldo, Orlando, Rodomonte, and Agramante – have found a home at the Italian American Museum. The intricately constructed and exquisitely decorated figures silently gaze back at visitors, as if awaiting the chance to enact their chivalric adventures once again.

In the absence of a puppeteer, Jo Ann Cavallo offers the next best thing: reintroducing these figures to contemporary audiences by describing their character traits and sharing highlights from their stories. Attendees will then have the opportunity to meet the puppets face to face in the exhibit – and to continue the conversation.

Jo Ann Cavallo is Professor of Italian at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1988. She has published numerous studies on Italian literature and culture, with particular attention to Renaissance chivalric epic and its afterlife in popular traditions. Her latest books, The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947): The Paladins of France in America and The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto, received multiple awards and have been published in Italian translation.

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