Our pal Juergen of Random Good Stuff and For 91 Days is in Palermo, Italy when he visited a fantastic little museum of puppets called the Museo delle Marionette.
He wrote:
The glory days of puppet theater are long since gone, obsoleted by more modern entertainment options like TV and movies. But Palermo is one of the few places that you can still catch a show, with a few family-run theaters continuing the tradition. We’re definitely going to at least one. But first, in order to learn a bit more about the art form, we visited the Museo delle Marionette.
In 2001, UNESCO added Sicilian Puppet Theater to its list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Sicilian performances are usually centered around knights and princesses, dragons and Christianity. Epic Norman ballads like The Song of Roland provide much of the material for the island’s puppeteers, who inject a fair amount of humor in their performances and also invent dialogue on the fly.
... but all I kept on thinking was: What's up with the puppet with the belly face?
Link - Thanks Juergen!