La maschera e il suo doppio. Pulcinella e il demonio nel teatro di Antonio Petito

In 1875, almost at the end of his career, Antonio Petito represents 'Nu diavolo ammacchiato, play that contains some elements of Goethe’s Urfaust in the version for Germany puppets. The comedy shows an identification among Pulcinella and devil whose tones refer to both the estranging form of puppet theater together with the technique of the parody, experimented by the Neapolitan author during all of his artistic life. Dualism between the mask and his diabolic double is accentuated on the stage by representative solutions revealing the “theater mechanism” and also thanks to a sampling of fantastic choices which normalize the homology between the comic musk and his cruel lapel. Petito's constant attention toward literary motives and melodramas coming from the outside world, resolves itself in this job in an eccentric maturity that adapts the European myth of the demon to the microcosm of the Neapolitan theater, where the universal model becomes a tool in a drama built upon the writing of the actor.