As a puppeteer whose formation in Sicily coincided with opera dei pupi's heyday, Agrippino devoted his life to reimagining the vicissitudes of the Paladins of France and to representing them on stage for primarily Italian-speaking audiences in the Americas, from his early years in Argentina to his almost two decades of performing nightly in New York City. Even though American society changed substantially in the decades following the closing of the Teatro Manteo in 1939, the passion that Agrippino's children felt for the tradition motivated them to bring their style of Catanese puppet theater to a wide variety of audiences right up to the death of Mike Manteo in 1989.

Each successive adaptation is both an interpretation of the previous material and a recipe for living in the present. Agrippino's stated aim was to remain faithful to his source, the Storia dei paladini, and yet in the very act of transporting action from the page to the stage, he recreated the chivalric stories according to his own Weltanschauung. As exemplary as I find the eight selections that I chose to translate and analyze, they are only a fraction of Agrippino's 265 extant plays in the Paladins of France cycle. It is, therefore, my hope that anyone who has made it to the end of this study will be inclined to further investigate Agrippino's “irreplaceable scripts” and to read (or perhaps reread with fresh eyes) the chivalric masterpieces that gave rise to them.