In 1933, in the Turin countryside, the writer Guido Ceronetti, still a child, attended a performance of La Iena di San Giorgio (‘The Hyena of San Giorgio’) by the puppeteer Gualberto Niemen. Thirty-seven years later, Ceronetti used this same performance as the starting point for a rewriting (Einaudi, 1994) intended for his puppet theatre, the Teatro dei Sensibili, founded with Erica Tedeschi in 1970. Somewhere between popular legend and news item, the story of the ‘hyena’ of San Giorgio has often been performed in puppeteers' theatres. In 1835, a butcher from San Giorgio Canavese, Giorgio Orsolano, was sentenced to death for the murder of three young girls whom he had first raped and then cut into pieces to make it look like they had been killed by wild animals. Public opinion then spread the rumour that Orsolano, the ‘hyena’, had used the flesh of his victims to make products for his butcher's shop. The theme of the murderous butcher is central to the first text that writer Guido Ceronetti composed for his puppet theatre, the ‘Teatro dei Sensibili’. Ceronetti's literary text is a modern and sophisticated rewriting of a story that is now part of the repertoire of several great puppeteer families.

King Victor Emmanuel II despairs to Garibaldi because the notorious criminal nicknamed ‘The Hyena of San Giorgio’ is stealing the limelight in the newspapers: more and more young girls are being kidnapped and then disappearing. When the Savoyard people (identified as ‘Cri de douleur’) beg him to free them from the Hyena, Victor Emmanuel takes his time and goes to San Giorgio because it seems that there is a butcher there, Barnaba Caccú, who makes the best sausages in all of Piedmont. Meanwhile, the nobleman Femorino wants to make sure that his fiancée, Angiolina, is a virgin, but when asked the question, Angiolina explodes in a fit of vulgarity and then reveals that she wants to marry a certain ‘Pensive Knight’ who secretly sends her love letters. Angiolina realises that her secret lover is the wanted criminal and, rejecting Femorino, agrees to marry him. Meanwhile, at Angiolina's house, her parents have invited Femorino to dinner: on the table is a sausage from the famous butcher of San Giorgio. Femorino finds a ring still attached to a piece of finger on his plate. No one suspects anything, however, and Femorino goes to the butcher's to return the ring. Meanwhile, in the butcher's hidden workshop, Caccù, with the help of his servant Crimea, has tied Angiolina to the table to turn her into sausage, but when he hears someone coming, he runs away. So when Femorino enters the workshop and finds Crimea with Angiolina tied up next to him, he immediately mistakes him for the Hyena. Meanwhile, in order to escape, Caccú has gone to the station disguised as a nun and expects the whole army to be sent after him. However, no one pays any attention to him. Outraged at not being recognised as the great criminal he is, Caccú confesses everything, even to King Victor Emmanuel II, but no one believes him. Left alone on stage, he shouts in vain, ‘It's me, I am the Hyena of San Giorgio.’