The Sicilian puppet theater is one of the great vernacular art traditions in Sicily and it’s being kept alive by a few talented and devoted practitioners of this medieval dramatic art form. There’s a Sicilian puppetry museum in Palermo, where you can see performances and a wonderful collection of puppets from Sicily and around the world, but in some souvenir stands, such as this one in Catania, little marionettes are sold. They depict the medieval knights called the ‘Paladins’, the mythical Christian, chivalric army of the Emperor Charlemagne, immortalized in the medieval epic ‘The Song of Roland’. They dangle from their strings, ready for someone to lift them into action.