Rediscovering Our Past

Madeline Northup

It is every researcher’s dream to discover historical material, untouched by others, just waiting to be shown the light of day. Heirlooms hidden in basements, pictures in old dust-covered photo albums, and letters stuffed in books can all lead to discoveries of great personal and academic importance. Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian at Columbia University, has made many such discoveries in her life, the first being in the attic of her grandmother’s old house.

Tucked away among boxes of family items, Jo Ann found the corredo, or hope chest, that had been promised to her aunt, then to her, after her aunt’s passing. Within the chest were multiple pieces of hand-embroidered tablecloths, linens, and sheets made by the women in her family. Faced with the discovery of multi-generational handiwork, Jo Ann was inspired to write a memoir-essay about the moment she reassembled a part of her family’s history.[1]

Despite the rare nature of discoveries of such a personal nature, Jo Ann was teaching a course on Renaissance chivalric epics and folk performance at Columbia when another opportunity to uncover history came her way. A student of hers had recently located the descendants of Agrippino Manteo, a Catanese puppeteer who had brought Sicilian puppet theater to New York during the early 1900s. Opening up his own puppet theater on the Lower East Side, then in Little Italy, Agrippino and his family charmed crowds with handmade puppets and self-composed scripts based on the Paladins of France cycle.

With direct access to the descendants of a key figure in the introduction of Sicilian puppet theater to the U.S., Jo Ann and her student interviewed Agrippino’s grandchildren, Pino Manteo and Susie Bruno, in 2004. In 2010, the Manteo family donated many of the notebooks and puppets of Agrippino to the Italian American Museum  (IAM) of New York. With the notebooks made available to her by the IAM and members of the Manteo family, Jo Ann was able to scan and analyze the chivalric epic scripts used in the Opera dei Pupi performances. Many, she discovered, were adaptations of Giusto Lodico’s Storia dei paladini di Francia, refashioned in Agrippino’s own style with passages of poetry. Jo Ann had discovered yet another gold mine of academic treasure, and, with notes from Agrippino sketched in the margins of some of his notebooks, she had been handed insights into the puppeteer’s thought process in creating narrative sequences and staging dramatic action.

Having pursued a doctorate in Italian at Yale University and written her dissertation on Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Italian Renaissance poem, Orlando Innamorato, Jo Ann had researched and taught Italian literature at Columbia University since 1988. The opportunity to analyze the plays of Agrippino led her to author The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884-1947)[2], in which she translates and examines eight of the 330 plays in the family’s Paladins of France cycle. Published in 2023, her book has been translated into Italian by Paolo Tartamella, and includes a new chapter on the construction of the Manteo puppets by Alessandro Napoli. It has also won three awards, including the American Association of Teachers of Italian Book Award for Literacy, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies, the Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize, and the UNIMA-USA Nancy Staub Prize.

With still many plays yet to be translated and analyzed, Jo Ann plans to continue her work on Manteo’s notebooks and make the scanned images of the notebooks publicly accessible through the eBOIARDO website[3]. Discoveries are meant to be shared, and Jo Ann has done so with great passion through both her writing and her teaching. As someone whose family history can also be found in the dimly lit basement of my house, I hope to make more discoveries like Jo Ann, uncovering parts of my identity, as well as those of others. Organizing and translating the plays of Manteo uncovered a rich history of Sicilian theater in the U.S., and provided both scholars and interested readers alike with the opportunity to learn about a unique family whose talent was known throughout the state of New York in the twentieth century. Thus, just as with the corredo unearthed in the attic of her grandmother’s house, Jo Ann has brought history back to life, a significant Italian American accomplishment made known again.

[1] “Il corredo: Loss and Continuity in an Italian American Family.”  Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women’s Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora. Eds. Edvige Giunta and Joseph Sciorra.  Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.  313-25.  Accompanying slideshow: https://vimeo.com/108633509.

[2] Cavallo, J. A. (2023). The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884-1947): The Paladins of France in America. Anthem Press.

[3]  https://edblogs.columbia.edu/eboiardo/manteo-puppet-theater/