Teatro dei Pupi

Opera dei Pupi (Puppet Theatre) is a traditional form of Sicilian entertainment, originating as far back as the 15th century, marionettes were a popular form of medieval entertainment.  Mostly, theatres produced tales relating to local legends and historical events, the most popular of these featured fictional heroes from the Norman conquests: Ruggiero defending the honour of his lover Bradamante, sister of Rinaldo, or Tancredi’s fight to death with the mighty Saracen Argante.  The pioneer of the puppet opera in Syracuse was Francesco Puzzo, who made the his first puppet in 1875.  He debuted his creation in a basement on the island of Ortygia.  Francesco ceased performing in 1917, but four years later his sons, led by Ernesto, revived the puppet theater.  In 1923, a young pastry chef by the name of Rossario Vaccaro (Saro) opened a shop across the street from the Puzzo brothers. The puppets intrigued Saro.  Despite the exclusionary tradition of the trade, he managed to gain acceptance and began studying under Ernesto, learning how to construct puppets and armor, paint scenery, write scripts, and produce the necessary advertise materials for shows.  Saro abandoned pastry and began building puppets in a small workshop on Ortigia.  In the 1970’s his brother, Alfredo, a talented papier-mâché craftsman and movie operator, joined the venture.  The Vaccaro brothers performed in the streets and squares, wherever they could attract a crowd, intent on reviving interest in the tradition of puppet opera.  Finally, in 1978, thirty years after the closing performance of Ernesto Puzzo, the Vaccaros staged a show at the church of San Giovannello, in the Jewish Quarter of Ortygia. Following its enormous success, the city donated space in an old convent in the historic center for a permanent Opra dei Pupi theater. Saro died in the spring of 1984 but Alfredo carried on until, in 1990, a severe earthquake damaged their theater beyond repair. Once again the puppets were without a home.  In their place, Alfredo crafted new papier-mâché creatures with rough features and cold glass eyes. Once again he turned to the streets, squares, and schools to perform, now accompanied by his grandson, Alfredo Mauler.  

His grandson Alfredo resurrected the puppets and converted a shop in the old Jewish Quarter into Teatro dei Pupi. The Puppet Museum, just down the street from the theater, is also run by the family, as is the workshop where Daniel creates all the puppets.  Alfredo Mauceri has written and produced 24 shows over the years for Teatro dei Pupi.  His mother Francesca Vaccaro, does all the female voices and his brother, Daniel, builds the puppets.  He writes the story and is a puppeteer during the show, along with Daniel and one other relative. Together, the three of them move the characters during the show, sometimes one in each hand.  His love of the puppets grew out of a strong bond with his grandfather, Alfredo Vaccaro.  As a young boy he had accompanied his grandfather when he staged puppet shows in the market square on Ortygia Island. Gradually, his grandfather allowed him to work with the characters.  Within three months he learned to move the puppets, but it took years to get the emotion and sensation of the characters. Below are more photos and a short trailer video of a performance unfortunately I was not filming for any of the decapitations, quite clever and requiring some coordination between puppeteers.

The theater is located on Via Della Giudecca 17/19, in the Old City, located on Ortygia Island. Two shows are performed daily, from March to November. As the theater is quite small, seating no more than 20, reservations are strongly recommended. Call 0931 465540, or stop by between the hours of 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. or 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Their website http://www.pupari.com is only in Italian.  All the plays are traditional stories adapted and written by the Vaccaro-Mauceri family and performed in Italian with a few lines of Sicilian dialect added for good measure.  Each performance lasts for approximately 30 minutes, making them suitable for children to enjoy.  At the bottom of this post are three professional videos of the teatro, museo, and include interviews with Alfredo Mauler.

Sanctuary of Our Lady of Tears (Syracuse)

On 29 August 1953 in a very small and humble house located in Via degli Orti S. Giorgio 11 in Syracuse, there was an inexplicable miracle: an effigy of plaster depicting the Immaculate Heart of Mary wept for four consecutive days when the girl, Antoinette, was pregnant and was suffering serious health problems arising from pregnancy.  The gathered the tears were subjected to scientific analysis that determined them to be tear fluid.  The devotion that followed was of enormous proportions.  The small effigy of Our Lady of Tears was first provisionally admitted in the nearby Piazza Euripides.  Luigi Garlaschelli, member of CICAP, reproduced several times the miracle of a tearing  statue of porous material by soaking it in a saline liquid. In a glazed statue some holes were drilled at eye level where liquid was able to escape giving the effect of tears.  Garlaschelli recovered an exact copy of the Syracuse statue made by the same manufacturer in the same period, and pointed out that it is just glazed plaster.

Following an international competition, French architects Michel Andrault and Pierre Parat designed the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Tears.  Construction began in 1966, but because of the extreme modernity of the project from the beginning there was a lot of controversy by citizens who considered the work a concrete monster that would weigh further on an urban area already heavily compromised.  These diatribes delayed the realization that ended only in 1994. During the excavation for the foundations workers unearthed a piece of road, the main route of the neighborhood Akradina from the sixth century BC.  After about 28 years construction was completed and the sanctuary opened on November 6, 1994 by Pope John Paul II.  Eight years later, the same John Paul II elevated it to the rank of minor basilica.

The sanctuary consists of the crypt and the upper temple, with a conical body formed by ribs in reinforced concrete that reach a total height of 74 m, surmounted by a steel crowning of 20 meters in height wearing a bronze statue Madonna gold, the work of Francesco Caldarella, surrounded by a halo. At the base of the cone are rectangular boxes which extend outward and house the various chapels.  In the upper temple is the central altar that houses the effigy.  On the floor of the crypt one can see preserved the remains of the Roman period

Temenite hill

We'll visit that rocket cone on the horizon in the next post.

This archaeological park, home to the 5th-century-BC Teatro Greco, provides a classicist wonderful insight to Greek culture.  Hewn out of the rocky hillside, this 16,000-seat amphitheater staged the playwrights Epicharmus, Phormis and Deinolocus.  Aeschylus put on "The Aitnans" probably in 456 BC.  Also The Persians, which had already been performed at Athens in 472 BC, may have been performed here.  A typical characteristic of Greek theatres, the celebration of the panoramic view, offered here a view of the bay, of the port, and the island of Ortygia.  It had a diameter of 138.6 meters, one of the largest in the Greek world, and originally had 67 rows of seating, mostly cut into the living rock, divided into nine sectors by access stairs.  The upper portion of the seating, now destroyed, was built up on top of an embankment held up by a retaining wall.   

The Grotta del Ninfeo

The Grotta del Ninfeo

Above the theatre there is a terrace, excavated in rock, accessible by a central stairway and by a recessed path, known as "Via dei Sepolcri" (Street of the Tombs).  Originally, the terrace had a large portico at the left.  In the center of the wall was a grotto, the grotta del Ninfeo, excavated in the rock.  At the entrance there were statues dedicated to the Muses.  Inside the room was a tub made of made of tiles broken up into very small pieces and mixed with mortar, into which water from the ancient Greek aqueduct flowed.  From here the water flowed into the hydraulic system of the theatre.  

During a trip to Syracuse in the late 1700s, the painter Jean-Pierre Houël depicted the Grotta del Ninfeo as he found it.

The Romans made important modifications to the theatre, the seating was modified to a semicircular form, typical of Roman theatres, rather than the horseshoe used in Greek theatres.  Remaining abandoned for centuries, under the Spanish it underwent degradation as they used the stone blocks to construct new fortifications on Ortygia. This process led to the destruction of the scene building and the upper part of the seating.  In late spring a season of classical theatre brings the theater to life.

A caper plant growing in the wall

la Latomia del Paradiso

Ear of Dionysius

After visiting the teatro, one can see la Latomia del Paradiso.  In Italian latomia means quarry so when it was functioning as such it certainly wasn't paradise.  Going there reminds me of a time as a math student, having just presented an elegant solution to a problem my professor asked to see how I arrived at it, then he laughed, and said, "that's like being shown a beautiful gem then asking to see the pile of dirt that was dug up to uncover it." So let's go look at some dirt.  The old limestone quarry is now an exuberant garden (hence pardiso) that houses the famous caves including Ear of Dionysius (Italian: Orecchio di Dionisio).  Arranged almost as an arc along the edge of a jagged rocky ridge, for about 1 , 5 km, bordered on the north by the ancient urban plan; and beyond them, it opened the wide plateau of Epipoli (literally: the area above the city), it provided, during the Greek period, no less than 850,000 cubic meters of limestone blocks used for building the ancient city.  They were probably dug as early as the fifth century BC, and used until Roman times. It's also where the 7000 survivors of the war between Syracuse and Athens in 413 BC were imprisoned. Cold winter and hot summer, to be imprisoned in the quarries was tantamount to a death sentence left to die of hunger and exhaustion, with no possibility of escape.  No amnesty in those days, either you die in battle or a few miserable years later.  

Ear of Dionysius

The bottom of latomia, with its original mining plan, was much deeper than the current one, which has formed by the accumulation of alluvial material and been covered by a citrus grove.  The blocks of rock were extracted normally open pit; but when the most compact layers - and thus more suitable material and valuable - extended below the surface crust, they dug into the rocky ridge creating enormous caves, with walls that sometimes reached 40 meters in height supported by rock pillars spared from the excavation.  Over time, and as a result of earthquakes that frequently affect Sicily, the roofs of these large caves collapsed, so that today the latomia presents itself as open air; but the original shape is shown by the large boulders collapsed on the floor, and the high rocky pier that stands still, lonely and suggestive, at the center of quarry.  Along the north wall, one can enter one of the large caves that were part of the system of grottoes of the latomia known as the Ear of Dionysius.  The painter Caravaggio coined the name in 1586. It refers to the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse. According to legend, Dionysius used the cave as a prison for political dissidents, and by means of the perfect acoustics eavesdropped on the plans and secrets of his captives, or another legend claims that Dionysius carved the cave in its shape so that it would amplify the screams of prisoners being tortured in it.  Unfortunately, the sound focusing effect can no longer be heard because access to the focal point is no longer possible.  Because of its reputation for acoustic flawlessness, the Ear of Dionysius has also come to refer to a type of ear trumpet that has a flexible tube. The term 'Ear of Dionysius' can also refer to surveillance, specifically that for political gain.  There is a strong possibility that this feature is actually of natural origin. It lies on the down slope side of a substantial hill it could well be a 'slot' canyon cut by rainwater run-off in prehistoric times.  The highly polished sides also suggest that the phenomenon was created by water, not by quarrying.  At any rate the feature is 23 meters high and extends 65 meters into the cliff. 

Amphitheater Romano

Back outside this area you'll find the entrance to the 2nd-century Amphitheater Romano, originally used for gladiatorial combats and horse races. The Spaniards, little interested in archaeology, largely destroyed the site in the 16th century, using it as a quarry to build Ortygia's city walls. West of the amphitheater is the 3rd-century-BC Ara di Gerone II , a monolithic sacrificial altar to Heron II where up to 450 oxen could be killed at one time.

the 3rd-century-BC Ara di Gerone II , a monolithic sacrificial altar to Heron II