Ciro Perna was a Neapolitan puppeteer, working mostly in Frattamaggiore, a municipality of the metropolitan city of Naples. He belonged to a family of opera dei pupi puppeteers, a theatre of armed rod puppets that mainly performed stories of chivalry. His father Giuseppe had managed a theatre in Caivano (Naples), while his grandfather, Ciro, was a pupil of a well-known 19th century puppeteer, Giovanni De Simone, who had managed several pupi theaters in Naples. Most notably, Ciro Perna performed cycles of shows about the paladins of France and cycles based on the stories of the Neapolitan camorrists, two repertoires characteristic of the Campanian opera dei pupi. In his shows, he was even able to combine these two repertoires, performing two acts on the stories of the Camorra and one act based on the exploits of the paladins. He did not write his own scripts, but he staged shows by authors such as Ciro Verbale or Giuseppe Abbruzzese. In 1977, Antonio Pasqualino invited him to the festival held at the Museo internazionale delle marionette in Palermo. In September 1981, one of his shows about the Camorra was shown on the Italian public television's second channel (Rete 2), in four episodes. Throughout his life, he gathered a huge collection of puppets, scenery, objects and texts (70,000 manuscript pages) from other Neapolitan puppeteers. All of these heritage items have since been acquired by the Provincia di Napoli.