Introduction

Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato begins with two East Asian rulers threatening Carlo's Frankish realm. The first to be announced—although his arrival is long postponed—is King Gradasso who ventures all the way from Sericana (southeast Asia) to France in order to acquire Orlando's sword Durlindana and Ranaldo's horse Baiardo. This impetuous acquisitive desire prompts the author's opening reflection on very powerful rulers who crave what they do not possess: “The greater obstacles there are / to reaching what they would obtain / the more they jeopardize their realms, / and what they want, they cannot gain” (OI 1.1.5). The second ruler, King Galafrone, has sent his daughter Angelica and son Argalia from Cathay (China) to France to challenge all the knights present at Carlo's international tournament to undertake a new joust with the princess herself as the prize. Since Argalia possesses an enchanted lance that knocks his opponent from the saddle at the slightest touch, the proposed contest is simply a ruse to lead the unwary knights, both Christian and Saracen, back to Cathay as prisoners. Although Galafrone's scheme will not go as planned, Angelica's presence in Paris and sudden departure nonetheless have the effect of shifting the conceptual frame of the poem from Carolingian epic to Arthurian romance in its opening canto.

The contemporary Sicilian puppeteer Mimmo Cuticchio asserts that “the Arrival of Angelica is one of the traditional public's most loved episodes because the most beautiful stories, interlaced with love, duels, and enchantments, begin from this point” (50). The episode is also one of the most iconic moments in Italian literary history. It was subject to creative imitation in subsequent fiction, such as the entrance of Armida in Torquato Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata and, extending into the novel, that of characters named Angelica in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard and, beyond the Italian tradition, Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence. The episode remains one of the most frequently staged plays in Sicilian puppet theater today. As we shall see below, Agrippino endeavored to make his theatrical version particularly memorable. After interweaving Gradasso's exploits and the interactions between the Christian Franks and Saracen Spaniards in Acts 1 and 2, the puppeteer devotes all of Act 3 to elaborating the arrival of Angelica in ways that go well beyond the Storia dei paladini's prose adaptation.