Castello dei Burattini (Giordano Ferrari Museum)

One of the most important Italian collections of puppet theatre, 'Il Castello' is dedicated to Giordano Ferrari, puppeteer from Parma, skilful carver but also a passionate researcher, who had the merit of creating the collection that the City of Parma, the owner, offers to the public. An illustrious venue, about three hundred square meters located inside the ancient Complex of San Paolo, the Museum has been designed as a lively and active place. With a patrimony of 2842 pieces including puppets, marionettes, puppets, puppets, 637 pieces between backdrops and backstage, 438 scripts (mostly manuscripts), a specialized library on puppet theatre and a paper archive that can be consulted by the public (containing posters, photographs, letters, etc.) the Castello dei Burattini (Giordano Ferrari Museum), periodically displaying about 500 pieces from its collections, offers visitors a stimulating and entertaining itinerary.

The exhibition inaugurated on December 27, 2018 begins with puppets that have been sculpted, or have worked, in a purely Emilian area: the famous dynasties of priests and Campogallians who influenced the formation of many artists who lived in the past two centuries, including those of the province of Parma to whom a shrine is dedicated. Continuing on, you can see pieces that belonged to puppeteers of central-northern origin of the same period, followed by others that come close to the present day, made of cloth or papier-mâché, such as the puppets built and used by the Roman painter Carlo Ludovico Bompiani that were donated to the museum by his sons in October 2018. In the last room there is a sort of monograph about the Ferraris of Parma who, puppeteers for 4 generations, have created a real stylistic feature in the sculpture of the pieces. In the central showcases there are the puppets that belonged to great Italian companies of the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th century; one space is reserved to the three main traditions (Palermo, Catania and Naples) of the Opera dei Pupi and another to Gruppo 80, which with its television puppets, like Uan, has fascinated generations of children in the last two decades of 1900.