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Buffalo Bill
Two years later, they returned to Europe and went to Italy where they were invited to the Vatican to attend the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the coronation of Pope Leo XIII. Also, in Verona, Cody fulfilled his ambition of exhibiting his "Wild West" (he disliked the term "show") in an ancient Roman amphitheater. (In Rome he was unable to fulfill his dream of playing in the Coliseum, itself, as there was too much rubble and stone cluttering the arena; he settled for having himself and his troupe photographed in front of it.) A high point of the visit to Rome was a
bronco-busting challenge "grudge match" between
Buffalo Bill's cowboys and true working cowhands from
the Maremma region in central Italy, men who spent
much of their time working with the Cajetan breed of
horse, the wildest and most unmanageable in Italy. The
Prince of Teano challenged Cody's men to break the
Cajetans. Twenty thousand spectators saw the contest.
The Rome correspondent of the New York Herald wrote: The brutes made springs into the air, darted hither and thither in all directions, and bent themselves into all sorts of shapes, but all in vain. In five minutes the cowboys had caught the wild horses with the lasso, saddled, subdued and bestrode them. Then the cowboys rode them around the arena while the dense crowds applauded with delight. Depending on who is telling the story, the Maremma cowboys were then only marginally to moderately successful at trying to duplicate that feat on Cody's horses. Buffalo Bill opened in Naples on January 26, 1890.
(An imaginative local had counterfeited more than
two-thousand tickets—and why am I not surprised at
that?!—producing great confusion at the opening.) An
ad in the Neapolitan newspaper, il Paese, that
day announced: Buffalo Bill's Wild West!
The Neapolitan papers praised Cody and his band: That which may seem to the everyday Neapolitan to be a kind of game, an idle display of skill, is nothing less than a common necessity of everyday life in a country where acrobatic agility, boundless audacity and prowess are conditions for survival.The reporter was enthusiastic, yet, in the next breath, melancholy at what apparently was a "faithful reproduction" of the passing of a native race, of the "…red race fleeing from destruction wrought by whites". Today, those raised on the "authenticity" of films
and television can scarcely comprehend what a live
display of this kind must have meant to Europeans of
the late 19th century. Speaking of a simulated Sioux
attack on an immigrant wagon train, part of the daily
show in Naples, the reporter for il Paese
continued: No description can convey the effect of an authentic mounted charge by Indians, this folk who here show us a few meager scenes from a life that until a few years ago was theirs to lead untrammeled. Buffalo Bill Cody had brought a kind of time machine
with him. He had opened a window and given a
privileged few a chance to look out and glimpse
something very rare: an authentic reproduction of a
way of life played for them by the very people who had
led it. The window would soon close and the players
would become anachronisms and caricatures of
themselves. Then, generations of imitators and made–up
distortions of "cowboys and Indians" would follow. For
a fleeting moment, however, the citizens of Naples and
other European cities got a chance to see the real
thing. A curious sidelight
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European
fascination for the American West was never more in
evidence than in the late 1800s. Colonel William
Frederick Cody—"Buffalo Bill"—after a lifetime of
hunting, scouting and soldiering, took his enormously
successful "Wild West" show on two tours of Europe. In
1887 he and his troupe went to Britain where they
played to enthusiastic crowds —indeed, to an
enthusiastic Queen Victoria, herself, who liked the
show so much that she went back to see it a second
time. Everyone was eager to see the fabled buffalo
hunter and Indian fighter, the sharp–shooting Annie
Oakley and bands of real Sioux warriors and, maybe—as
did the Prince of Wales—even ride on the fabled
Deadwood Stage! 
And so
Buffalo Bill let the West run wild in Naples for a
while. Bear in mind that no one—not Cody, not his
company, and certainly not the people who watched them
perform throughout Europe—viewed this as a circus. It
was more of a replay, if you will, of current events.
In 1890 the Indian Wars that had raged along the
American frontier had not even totally subsided. The
West may have been won, but the combatants were still
very much alive. The Native Americans in Cody's troupe
were not stage 'Indians'—they were the real thing,
many of the very same Sioux braves who had fought
Custer at the battle of the Little Big Horn. Indeed,
they were in Cody's troupe only because he got them
released into his custody for his tour after they were
imprisoned in the wake of the last great Sioux
uprising. Back in America, Chief Sitting Bull was
still alive and still their leader, (although he would
be "shot while trying to escape" from internment later
that same year of 1890). (Cody would live until
1917.) 
Tales of Buffalo Bill were present in
much popular adventure fiction in many countries in
the early 20th century, including Italy. In the 1920s,
the Nerbini publishing house in Florence started
publishing, in illustrated (I hesitate to say “comic
book”) format, the adventures of