Michael Buonanno

• State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota

Sicilian Epic and the Marionette Theater analyzes the folkloric genres that comprise the repertoire of the marionette theater in Sicily. Here, epic, farce, saints’ lives, bandits’ lives, fairy tales, Christian myth, and city legend offer the vehicles by which puppeteers comment upon, critique—perhaps even negotiate—the relationships among the major...

Mythology—circulated in sacred stories (myths) and their reenactments (rituals)—is the basis of any society’s religion, and religion is an essential key to identity. In fact, mythology's meaning is dependent on the elaboration of identity in cultural metaphors that are at once ecological (arising from a society’s environmental exploitation), sociol...

[Routledge Abstract] Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity examines the life of Italians in the United States and the role of migration and collective memory in the history of the construction of Italian American identity. Employing the concept of communicative memory, the authors explain the processes which gave shape to Italian...

Abstract: Among the more unfathomable mysteries of religion is the manner in which the spiritual intersects with the social as well as the manner in which this intersection impacts one’s sense of identity. I suspect, though, that this intersection--and its ramifications with regard to identity--occurs narratologically: that is, in the world of stor...

Abstract: While following a procession in honor of the Immaculate Virgin, I happened upon a peculiar statue, the Genius of Palermo, tucked into a niche of a crumbling building. As I came to learn the significance of that statue, I found a hidden key to understanding one of the many mysteries of the Sicilian version of the Carolingian Cycle—for the...

Abstract: As with all immigrant communities, a shared history in another country, the migration itself, the scramble to make a living and build communities in the host country, not to mention the innumerable foibles of various members of the community (not quite Old World anymore but not yet New World either in their speech, dress, demeanor, and wo...

Excerpt from Chapter One: A particularly brutal episode in this sad history is recounted in our grandfather’s home province of Benevento in the communes of Casalduni and Pontelandolfo. Pontelandolfo was a village with 5,500 residents, most of them landless peasants who had welcomed Garibaldi as a liberator. But less than a year later, the galantuom...

Excerpt from Chapter Two: In 1871, when just two percent of Italy’s 26 million citizens lived outside the country, there was little inkling of the seismic change to come. By 1911, however, 14 percent of Italians lived abroad and, in 1920, nine million of Italy’s 26 million—a full third of the Italian population—lived outside Italy. While Italians w...

Excerpt from Chapter 3: The migrants were, of course, expected to produce their funds. A telling accounting emerged in 1902: “Last year the 388,931 immigrants,” passing through Ellis Island, “showed $5,490,080, an average of $14.12. The French led all the others with an average of $39.37. The Hebrews stood at the foot of the list, bringing on an av...

Excerpt from Chapter 4: Nominally, the nuclear family was patriarchal but a number of analysts have, following Patrick Gallo, more aptly described the Southern Italian as well as Italian American nuclear family as “father-dominated but mother-centered.” The father ruled the family as long as he remained in good health and was the chief breadwinner—...

Excerpt from Chapter 5: Yet another report of a vibrant Italian American community emerges from our own hometown, Rochester, which boasts the 9th largest Italian population in the country’s major cities. In one of the most endearing depictions of the ‘old neighborhood’ to emerge from the Italian diaspora, Jerre Mangione offers his memories of the c...

Undoubtedly inexpensive passage and a shorter time at sea were significant factors that encouraged Italian transatlantic immigration previous to its dramatic curtailment. And certainly the fact that Italian relatives and neighborhoods awaited them, likewise, eased the fears that the though of migration might otherwise raise. But it was, after all,...

Excerpt from Chapter 7: On March 25th, 1911, a fire broke out in the cutting room on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory which occupied the three uppermost floors of a ten story Greenwich Village building. The doors of the factory had been locked (a common strategy at the factory) to keep the 500 or so women and girls—mainly Jewish,...

Abstract: Among the numerous stories that we heard in our youth as well as in the course of our fieldwork were a number that dealt with the Mafia. What these stories collectively suggested to us is the “disorganized” nature of “organized” crime in the Italian American community. While at its “high-point,” in locales where high percentages of Italia...

Excerpt from Chapter 9: Rites of passage offer a good case in point. The essential transitions in the life cycle that are marked globally—birth, adolescence, marriage, and death—are observed by the Italian American community as well but the rites of passage that demarcate these transitions are, if not sponsored by, at least inscribed with imagery b...

Excerpt from Chapter 10 (Malocchio: The Evil Eye): Grandma cleansed the evil eye by drawing the debilitating power, invidia, out of her patient's body and replacing it with the medicinal power, grazia (grace). She did this by means of a ritual which symbolically reenacted baptism, the most essential rite of passage to the Italian American community...

Excerpt from Chapter 11: From their earliest days in America, Italians celebrated a myriad of patron saints from Naples, Palermo, Reggio di Calabria and the numerous villages of the Mezzogiorno. Arguably the most popular saints among Italian Americans were—and remain—Saint Anthony of Padua (June 13), Our Lady of Mount Carmel (July 16), and Saint Jo...

Excerpt from Chapter 12: Just as a saint’s life could be reconfigured as a tale of spiritual awakening, a bandit’s life, in Italy the inverse of the saint’s life, could be reconfigured as a gangster tale. Both bandits’ lives in Italy and gangster tales in the U.S. were based in historical fact and depended on an admixture of news reports and gossip...

Excerpt from Conclusion (Hungry Idealists): Through celebrating their distinctiveness while recognizing their commonality, we suspect, a novel empathy for diasporic communities might emerge—a novel empathy which may serve as just the corrective which today’s immigration debates badly needs. For it will allow us to remember this fact: People rarely...

Abstract: Mythology—disseminated in myths (spiritual stories) and ritual (mythic reenactments)—is the basis of any society’s religion. And religion, containing within itself a culture’s biological underpinnings, singular history, ecological concerns, sociological imperatives, ideological orientation, and linguistic particularities, is an essential...

Excerpt from Chapter 1: The accounts of shamanic flight display marked similarities to one another despite the sometimes significant cultural divides that separate those who recount them. The San shaman Kxao Giraffe once reported, “Just yesterday, friend, the Giraffe came and took me again.” He, further, spoke of traveling to the realm of the gods...

Excerpt from Chapter 2: The San refer to their myths as “stories of the old people.” Megan Biesele explains that they are “set in a long-ago time,” when the Creator set the world in motion, the Trickster “walked upon the earth,” and the “animals were people.” The Creator, after creating himself, gave himself the name Gangwanana, Big Big God, and th...

Excerpt from Chapter 3: The Euahlayi, like other Australian Aborigines, practice a religion which anthropologists call totemism. In brief, totemism entails a belief in a spiritual, as well as a material, existence for all essential elements of the environment. Animals, plants, items of human manufacture, topographical features, even celestial bodie...

Excerpt from Chapter 4: And, in fact, one can sometimes catch a glimmer of that adjustment in the conceptualization of that most essential Lakota metaphor: the buffalo. The Lakota made their onetime dependence upon and appreciation for the buffalo explicit in an intriguing story collected by the Native American anthropologist, Ella Deloria. The Buf...

Abstract: Though the world’s mythologies depend so heavily upon ecological and sociological metaphors, there is yet another set of metaphors that finds its way into our religious life. Encapsulated in the human form itself, it catches up a wide array of symbols expressed through the human body and body image, human actions and gestures, even charac...

Excerpt from Chapter 6: Among a number of people who kindly allowed me to interview them on the subject of Jewish culture and identity was Bobbi. Both her maternal and paternal grandparents emigrated from the Ukraine and grew up not terribly far from Kiev. Bobbi grew up in a New England community then dominated by Orthodox Jews congregating togethe...

Excerpt from Chapter 7: After dawdling about the streets the morning of the procession, waiting for the evening's festivities to begin, I popped back up to my room for a moment where a singular tragedy was unfolding. Mohammed, having the day off from work, had bought a chicken at the market, and, just as he was preparing to butcher it in our commun...

Abstract: Vodou, like other New World Orisha traditions, is syncretic: the product, in the case of Haiti, of the merging of a number of West African traditions with France’s Roman Catholicism. That said, it is never entirely clear how African or how Catholic this syncretization is. Sometimes the Vodou Spirits are more closely associated with Africa...

Excerpt from Conclusion: The easy manner in which contemporary spirituality integrates so many mythic traditions into its patterns of worship cannot help but alert us to the fact that our common mythic heritage is shot through with numerous points of contiguity, that our global mythologies are characterized by more that unite than divide us: Within...

Abstract: Sicily—where the sea routes of Africa, Asia, and Europe converge—is a land which accrues legends and its landscape is as scoured and pocked by the exploits of its heroes as ever was Australia’s by the peregrinations of its totems in the ancient times of the Dreaming. Keywords: Sicily, Narrative, Storytelling. Excerpt from Preface: It was...

Abstract: While following a procession in honor of the Immaculate Virgin, I happened upon a peculiar statue, the Genius of Palermo, tucked into a niche of a crumbling building. As I came to learn the significance of that statue, I found a hidden key to understanding one of the many mysteries of the Sicilian version of the Carolingian Cycle—for the...

Abstract: Central to understanding the pivotal place that the Carolingian Cycle holds in Palermitan folklore is a sense of the city’s history—and the social order that emerges from that history—for, more than anything else, it is the inscription of Palermo’s singular history in the Carolingian Cycle that makes the cycle Palermitan, that makes of th...

Abstract: In Palermo, the Carolingian Cycle opens with the early adventures of Charlemagne, Roland, and Renaud, the major epic heroes. Each of these nobles has, in youth, to lose the trappings of privilege and descend among the people before he can, his royal origins finally recognized, resume his rightful place at court. Here is a theme shared wit...

Abstract: Inasmuch as the themes from which the Carolingian Cycle's plots are constructed are the products of the various genres which comprise the marionette theater’s narrative repertoire, that is, epic, farce, saints’ lives, and bandits’ lives, it follows naturally that the plots which they actualize will be multigeneric in character. Nowhere is...

Abstract: As the Carolingian Cycle progresses away from the early adventures of its preeminent heroes—Charlemagne, Roland, and Renaud—and the dichotomy of knight and masque that actualizes them, a new juxtaposition emerges: that between saint and bandit. The saint is a permutation of the knight: noble in speech, obedient to the point of subservienc...

Abstract: As I was engaged in my fieldwork on Sicilian epic, I found it to be little more than an amusing irony that during the day I would be studying a folkloric tradition in which the preeminent villain was a villain simply because he was Muslim—or because he colluded with Muslims—while each evening I went home to share my life with Muslims. But...

Abstract: Though the Carolingian Cycle became—with time—the seminal product of the Sicilian folkloric repertoire, it wasn’t, in truth, only Sicily that became enchanted by the feats of Charlemagne, Roland, and Renaud. It was rather all medieval Europe. In fact, around the year 1200, the poet Jean Bodel set forth the three matters most suitable to c...

Abstract: The version of The Song of Roland extant in Palermo to this day has been forged by the same processes that forged all the 270 odd episodes of the Carolingian Cycle. Literary treatments have intermingled with the recitations of Palermitan storytellers and puppeteers and, I think more importantly, the whole has been reshaped by the expectat...

Abstract: Sicilian fairy tales might seem a funny kind of animal to those more accustomed to their German and French cousins. They’re certainly magical, but the magical apparatus doesn’t seem to be nearly as elaborate as that which we find in, say, the Brothers Grimm. Rather, Sicilian fairy tales continuously accentuate the social: whereas one witn...

Abstract: The central integers of the social order elaborated in Sicilian epic consist of the aristocracy and the people, juxtaposed by the fact that the former rules and (at least historically) fights while the latter is ruled and (when that scarce commodity is available) works. The secondary integers, the clergy and the Mafia, are juxtaposed soci...

Abstract: On my first visit to a Palermitan marionette theater, a young boy, his face brightening with surprise, said to me, "But you speak like a soldier!" He then turned to his friends and reiterated, "But he speaks like a soldier!" I did not understand it at the time, but he was telling me that my Italian was like that of an outsider, like that...

The Italian diaspora, in all its various manifestations, is characterized by a profound sense of ethnic identity. Even for those of us who don’t speak the language, there is a particular reality born of Sunday dinners at Grandmother’s, the sound of Italian— or more likely Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrian, or another of the Italian dialects—at the ki...

The Arthurian Reader: [Contents] 1: The Birth of Arthur (Thomas Malory): 1-11; 2: Sir Gawain the Green Knight (Anonymous): 12-35; 3: The Knight of the Cart (Chretien de Troyes): 36-48; 4: Sir Launfal (Marie de France): 49-55; 5: The High History of the Holy Grail (Chretien de Troyes): 56-85; 6: The Death of Arthur (Thomas Malory): 86-119. [Excerpt]...

The Trojan Reader: Part Two [Contents] 1: Apollodoros: The Homecomings, 2: Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 3: Apollodoros: The Revenge of Orestes, 4: Homer, The Odyssey, 5: Sappho, To an Army Wife in Sardis [Introduction] Something had to be done. My sister, an avid reader, said she tried to read The Iliad several times but couldn’t get through it. And, then...

The Trojan Reader: Part One [Contents] (i) Introduction (ii) Glossary (1) Apollodoros: The Abduction of Helen (2) Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis (3) Apollodoros: The War Begins (4) Homer: The Iliad (5) Quintus of Smyrna: The Death of Achilles (6) Apollodoros: The Theft of the Palladium (7) Virgil: The Fall of Troy [Introduction] Something had to be...

Abstacts: The Opera di Pupi, or marionette theater, is one of at least three interrelated traditions that present the Carolingian Cycle, which deals with the exploits of Charlemagne and his Paladins, to working class Sicilian audiences. Other major purveyors of that cycle include the Sicilian popular press and the contastorie, storytellers who decl...

See Updated Version (2018) for Full Text.

Through an exploration of the Palermitan puppeteers' narrative repertoire, that single genre of narrative privileged by puppeteers and audiences alike—epic—reveals itself to be a critique of Palermitan social relations. Multigenericity, or the convocation of characters from disparate genres of traditional narrative, and dialogism, or the citation o...

Published in 2014 as Sicilian Epic and the Marionette Theater: The Last Adventure analyzes the folkloric genres that comprise the repertoire of the marionette theater in Sicily. Here, epic, farce, saints’ lives, bandits’ lives, fairy tales, Christian myth, and city legend offer the vehicles by which puppeteers comment upon, critique—perhaps even ne...

Also available in Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural (1985) from which the following abstract comes: Although the belief in evil eye is commonly associated with societies far from the continental United States. Michael Buonanno illustrates the presence of this malevolent power among Italian immigrants in a...