great room with the ceiling at times, after all a rectangle violently illuminated: a small theater and a dwarfish stage crowded of fantastic characters. They are the paladins of king Carlo that fight, in a din of iron and struck woods, in the extreme battle of the Christian defense. Shines of caresses, to twirl of swords, colored plumes and half moons, heads that jump, bodies that divide him in two, legs, arms, trunks that are piled up in a slaughter that succeeds even, with a makeup to color him of liquid of blood. The crowded public in the great room is subjugated by the violence of the show. The eyes are fixed, blocked, the hands contracted nobody speaks and the emotion also nails the most restless children to the benches. The generous story of Roland is about to reach its dramatic conclusion. Once more it plays again on the plain one of Roncisvalle covered with dead bodies of Christians and infidels the penetrating sound of the olifante. But king Carlo won´t come that to concluded play when finally Roland stricken to death, after an agony made of tremors and convulsions you/he/she deigns of a great actor of the realistic theater you/he/she reclines the head on the stone and you/he/she dies, here and there in the room some men get up and with a slow and solemn gesture they are removed the hat. Here the sicilian puppet-player Emanuele Macrì " explains me the stages they are almost always two: that true with the sicilian puppets and the room with the public " also Says that the theater of the sicilian puppets has not followed anymore, that people don´t suit us more, that the television and the cinema have killed the work. Certainly the sicilian puppets have lost very public, but the faithful ones don´t miss. All it takes is coming here, in the theater, an evening and to see how people participate in the action, as the history of the Paladins lives. And it is a history that all know very well, they know her/it to memory, yet every time is as it was new. When it goes out Gano, everything suit of black as its conscience, needs to feel what the public shouts him. They say that once one has even shot against Gano. To me has never happened, but shoes in the stage so many have arrived of it and also wood pieces. An evening I was forced to suspend the show. I had put in scene the history of Guido of Santacroce that falls imprisoned of Micael, the man of the black mantle. These the door in a tower where it makes us feel some martyrs. I had the unhappy idea to submit this pupo to the torture of the red-hot iron with a makeup. When Micael passed for the second time this red-hot iron in the chest of Guido of Santacroce, the public rebelled him. To prevent that they unswathed me the theater I had to interrupt the show. Then I went out and I tried to bring the calm in the room. People shouted: " Enough, let´s stop her/it, shame ", and me " But they are puppets, not people of meat ", and the people: " And´ true but then they were not puppets, they were men and these tortures a Christian he/she doesn´t want her ". And´ the same with the Paladins. They know very well that it deals with puppets but they say " once they were men "......... ..... in the zone in Catania two are the " active works ": that of Emanuele Macrì to Acireale and that of Pippo Napoli to Paternò. The catanesis puppets are different a great deal from those palermitanis. They are greater, thicker, less mincing and elegant and they have the rigid legs (while those palermitanis have the articulated knee). Emanuele Macrì, student and adopted child of one of the most illustrious catanesi puppet-players of the past, Mariano Pennise, doesn´t have doubts on the superiority of the catanesis puppets on those palermitanis. Show me his "store" with the pride of a father. They are very beautiful puppets virile floods of vigor. " The Paladins " don´t have to have the articulated knees. Must have the rigid legs. Because the paladins never fold up the knee in front of anybody " The puppets that Macrì today uses I am a pó smaller and light than those traditional catanesis. " And´ is in 1927 that my adoptive father definite to abandon the old puppets. They were too much heavy to be maneuvered and it was not possible to make to move her with agility, with naturalness. Then I have manufactured these new sicilian puppets, always in the style catanese but a pò smaller ". Really enormous and heavy they are instead the sicilian puppets that it moves Pippo Napoli to Paternò. They are the old classical puppets catanesi.... ... Just for the structural characters of the puppets the catanesis puppet-players employ a different technique to make to move their characters. It would not be in fact possible to maneuver of side, that is from the scene, of the rag dolls of the weight of winds kilos (in the best of the cases) straight, through the iron auction, from an only stretched out arm and without support. To Catania the sicilian puppets stir from the tall one, with a "bridge" entirely equal to that classical of the northern puppets. In this way the sicilian puppet-player is forced to a smaller effort, even if always serious: folded up in two on the bridge, with the pupo in a hand, through the iron and the other busy to move the threads to create the movement. Unlike the real puppets that are worth him, to recite, more bawls, and these voices are those of the same operators, the sicilian puppets they speak only for the mouth of a speaker, that doesn´t maneuver. It is in scene and it declaims, in an unmistakable style, the wisecracks. Rarely law the script because a true sicilian puppet-player knows only not to memory the whole cycle of the Paladins (what hard eighteen months, that is over five hundred evenings, that is thousand hours) but a big number of other scripts of other epic and chivalrous cycles (religious texts are almost entirely by now gone out of the use). And´ impressive to see the transport with which the recitante develops its job, the share that sets to the story, up to the point to assume as (and naturally the public doesn´t see him/it) the same attitudes of the sicilian puppets. A different atmosphere entirely among the puppet-players of the North.......