Puppets (form the Latin pupus, i, which means little child) are the characteristic armored marionettes of the epic popular theatre theatre which, brought probably from the Spain of Don Quixote, operated in Naples and Rome, but mostly, from the first half of the nineteenth century, in Sicily, where it was to reach its full development.      Later on there was a tendency to attribute to them a patriotic origin, shifting their arrival to the year of Garibaldi's Sicilian exploits, but it has been proved that the puppets had already been performing in Catania and other cities for more than twenty years at the time that the "Hero of the Two Worlds" Garibaldi arrived in Sicily.      For more than a century protagonists of a theatre by and for the people, the Sicilian Puppets were unarmed in the beginning, but soon appeared dressed with armor more or less as they are today.

      The Sicilian Puppets represented a dialectic and dramatic interpretation of history on the level of folk-culture, where there could be found the expression of the aspirations with respect to power, justice, and the world.

      The Sicilian Puppets acted out the people's dilemma between being faithful or not, Christian or pagan, on the side of the Occident or Orient, in the midst of the imposing historical torment of the Mediterranean and, in particular, of Sicily - from time immemorial the stage of opposing beliefs and civilizations.

      The Sicilian Puppets are a marvelous expression of the epic, heroic and chivalrous spirit that from the medieval Chanson de geste to the great poems of  Boiardo and Ariosto, and to all a literary, musical, figurative, and theatrical tradition, marks the development of a sentimental education and an ethical and poetic vision of the world.

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