Antonio Pasqualino International Puppet Museum

The Association for the Conservation of Popular Traditions was established in 1965 by Antonio Pasqualino, with the involvement of a group of scholars and high-brows.

For over fifty years the association has been committed to safeguarding popular traditions and in particular to the safeguarding and promotion of the Opera dei pupi. This commitment becamwìe more evident when it engaged to support[8] the candidacy of the Opera dei pupi aimed at inscribing it in the UNESCO list. Successfully, in May 2001 the Opera dei pupi was declared as a Unesco Masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity, and in 2008, it was registered in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

In 2018 the association promoted the establishment of the "Italian network of organizations for the protection, promotion and enhancement of the Opera dei pupi", recognized by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism as a competent territorial body in the field of safeguard and representative of the tradition of the Sicilian Opera dei pupi. The network brings together 13 Sicilian puppet companies and various Italian cultural and research bodies (including the Central Institute for Intangible Heritage, the Italian Society for Museography and Demo-ethno-anthropological Heritage - SIMBDEA, the Ignazio Buttitta Foundation and the Kiklos Cultural Association). The association, as the reference subject of the network, is responsible for the drafting of the "Plan of Measures for the Safeguarding of the Sicilian Opera dei Pupi[9]" which aims to promote an ''effective plan of actions to safeguard, promote and enhance the element of the Opera dei pupi as part of a governance participation and a sustainable development project, consistent with the Operational Directives of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

In addition to this, in 2014 the association was accredited as a consultant non-governmental organization to the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (registration number NGO-90316).[10] In 2015, the association was registered in the National Research Registry of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research – MIUR (identification code 000358_ART3)[11] and since 2018, it is recognized as one of the cultural institutes of significant and ascertained value by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities; finally, in 2019 it was welcomed in the AICI – Association of Italian Cultural Institutions.[12]

Since its foundation, the International Puppet Museum has combined museum activity with performance:[13] it firstly re-proposed traditional puppet shows, and later also research and innovation performances. Therefore, it was never conceived as a place for the conservation of dead things, but it immediately engages to revitalize traditional performative practices. The annual "Festival di Morgana, previously name Review of the Opera dei pupi, on the one hand allows significant insights into the Sicilian and southern Italian repertoire, on the other hand it helps Sicilian puppeteers find a new professional dignity through the exchange with puppeteers from all over the world and contemporary artists, thus laying the foundations for a study of extra-European theatrical practices both related to puppetry theatre and forms of traditional ritual theater. Since then the theatrical activity of the museum has welcomed the production of innovative shows, in collaboration with writers, painters, visual artists, contemporary musicians (e.g. Calvino, Guttuso, Kantor, Baj, Pennisi). This exchange and collaboration with Italian and foreign companyes in the traditional and contemporary puppet field has allowed the acquisition of works interesting from both an ethno-anthropological and an artistic points of view consolidating the image of the museum as a performance museum engaged with heritage responsibility,[14] which continues its fervent activity between comparative research, museographic experimentation, revival of shows and support for Sicilian puppet companies.

The first nuclei of the museum's collection were formed around the Sicilian Opera dei pupi. Today the museum houses the largest and most complete collection of pupi from Palermo, Catania and Naples[15] and, among other things, it preserves the complete set of materials from three Opera dei pupi theaters: one of the Palermo tradition, which belonged to Gaspare Canino from Alcamo; one of the Catania tradition, which belonged to Natale Meli of Reggio Calabria; one of Neapolitan tradition that belonged to the Perna family of Frattamaggiore. The oldest pupo in the museum is "Carinda", dated to 1828 and once belonged to the Canino family. According to this family oral tradition, this marionette was the first armored pupo built by Don Liberto Canino.

The museum also exhibits other collections declared by UNESCO as "Masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity": the Japanese Ningyo Johruri Bunraku, the Indonesian Wayang kulit, the Cambodian shadow theater Sbek Thom, the puppet-masks of Nigeria-Benin called Gelede, Korea's puppet theater Namsadang Nori – Kkoktu-gaksi Norum, Turkish Karagöz and Sri Lanka's Rūkada Nātya puppets.

The collection includes marionettes and hand puppets from Northern Italy, Southern Italy (such as the Neapolitan guarrattelle and Sicilian tutui) and other European countries. The museum also exhibits numerous examples from Asia: Indian shadow puppets, Javanese rod puppets (Wayang golek) and two-dimensional figures (Wayang Klitik), string puppets from Burma (Yoke thai tabin) and India (Kathputli), water puppets from Vietnam (Mua roi nuoc), shadow puppets of Malaysia, Siam, and China. A rare puppet is from the New Hebrides (Temes nevinbur).

In Africa puppet theater presents different forms and is linked to both sacred life and enterntainement. The museum exhibits the Malian puppets known as Do: used in the Bambara theater, they are the first African puppet theater to be known in Europe. The aforementioned Gelede from Nigeria-Benin and the Congo rod puppets, called Kebe kebe and used by the Mbochi and Kuyu people, are mainly linked to the cult of their ancestors.

In the "Winter garden" of the museum, a space also used for temporary installations, and in the other museum's rooms, contemporary works of art are exhibited. They were made for three shows which were produced by the International Puppet Museum between the 1980s and 1990s, in collaboration with international figures. There one may find: the sets made by Renato Guttuso and used in Italo Calvino's Forest-Root-Labyrinth show, directed by Roberto Andò (1987); the puppets and stage machines created by the Polish artist and director Tadeusz Kantor for the show Machine of Love and Death (1987); and the puppets by Enrico Baj made for the show Le bleu-blanc-rouge et le Noir performed by Masimo Schuster's company Arc-en-terre (1990). Recently acquired, we also find the table puppets that Enrico Baj made for two other shows by Massimo Schuster: Roncesvalles and Mahabharata.

The museum is spread over three levels and houses numerous exhibition spaces, a bookshop, a library, a video library, a tape library and a theatre capable of hosting a substantial theatrical program.

The "Giuseppe Leggio" Library is annexed to the museum, which collects thirty thousand volumes on puppets, marionettes and popular traditions. Particularly valuable are the collections of manuscripts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, belonged to the puppeteers Gaspare Canino and Natale Meli, as well as the collection of knightly handouts published between the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth century. In particular, the first edition of the History of the Paladins of France by Giusto Lodico is still today the main source for the staging of traditional Opera dei pupi shows. Other sections are dedicated to popular traditions, cultural anthropology, ethnography, museography, linguistics, education, Sicilian history, theatre, art and literature. In 2006 the library became part of the national library center (SBN Center of the Municipal Library of Palermo).[16]

The museum also houses a multimedia archive. The photo library holds photos of the objects for the Inventory and of the installations that have taken place in the various locations of the museum; photos of the shows as well as of the various initiatives carried out over the years with particular reference to study initiatives (conventions, conferences, seminars), exhibitions in Italy and abroad. The audio-video library preserves reels of voice recordings relating to performances of various forms of puppetry, interviews and conferences dating back to the 1960s and already transferred to CD; audio cassette recordings; video-recordings and materials collected in part on behalf of the State Discotheque and in collaboration with the Institute of the History of Popular Traditions of the University of Palermo. These materials have been digitized or are in the process of being digitized and are all available upon request. The multimedia archives are regularly increased thanks to the incessant documentation activity carried out by the association.

• "Press release – ICOM Italy – Museum of the Year 2017 Award".
• "Festival di Morgana official website". Archived from the original on 19 April 2022. Retrieved 28 June 2022.
• "Safeguarding measures – Opera dei pupi".
• "Register of Non-Governmental Organizations accredited to provide advisory services to the Committee of the UNESCO".
• "Directory of National Research of the Italian Ministry for University and Research (MIUR)".
• "AICI's official website".
• ""Giuseppe Leggio" Library of the Associazione per la conservazione delle tradizioni popolari – International Puppet Museum".