Testimonianza importante per far conoscere e approfondire gli studi di uno dei settori “popolari” del teatro italiani, The Puppet House of Ravenna gathers about sixty puppets, 150 marionettes, over a hundred stage sets and as many handwritten scripts, as well as numerous paper materials from tours (posters, letters, announcements, permits), and scattered materials (wooden heads, marionette hands, costumes for marionettes and puppets). The marionettes come from the company “Fantocci Lirici Yambo” of Enrico Novelli (1875-1944), from the Picchi Family, and obviously from the family company.
Among the puppets are notable a series of traditional masks from Emilia (Fagiolino, Sandrone, Doctor Balanzone) which belonged to the Burattineide company of Agostino Galliano Serra, rediscovered by a researcher in an ancient Bolognese church and attached to the Collection in recent decades. Among the handwritten scripts, twelve are of significant value, as they were written in the first half of the nineteenth century by Ariodante Monticelli, the progenitor of the family; the others bear the signatures of other family generations: Vittorio Cesare Monticelli, Genoveffa Peli Monticelli, Otello Monticelli, Vasco Monticelli, William Monticelli; the rest are the work of well-known puppet theatre artists: Enrico Novelli, the Picchi Brothers, Ettore Forni, Ciro Bertoni, Agostino Galliano Serra, to name a few.
Some special exceptions are represented by some scripts by Mario Bellio. The stage sets are all made of paper except one made of canvas, gifted to Otello by the famous Bolognese puppeteer Ciro Bertoni. Many of these were originally made for the puppet theatre, with widths reaching six to seven meters and heights of three to four meters, but most have been downsized to be used in the puppet “hut”.
The valuable stage sets belonging to the Picchi Family and the progenitor Ariodante Monticelli date back to the first half of the nineteenth century, while those painted by Agostino Galliano Serra are from the early twentieth century, and those created by William Monticelli are from the immediate post-war period. An exhibition section (puppets, stage sets, posters) is also dedicated to the last twenty-five years of work by the Teatro del Drago, founded in 1979 by Andrea and Mauro Monticelli.
