Italian: Cantastoria (pronounced as /it/; also spelled Italian: cantastorie pronounced as /it/, Italian: canta storia or Italian: canta historia) comes from Italian for "story-singer" and is known by many other names around the world. It is a theatrical form where a performer tells or sings a story while gesturing to a series of images. These images can be painted, printed or drawn on any sort of material.
In 6th-century India, religious tales called Sanskrit: saubhikas were performed by traveling storytellers who carried banners painted with images of gods from house to house. Another form called Sanskrit: yamapapaka featured the storytellers carrying vertical cloth scrolls and sung stories of the afterlife. In recent times, this is still performed by Chitrakar women from West Bengal, India.
In Tibet, this was known as Tibetan: ma-ni-pa and in other parts of China this was known as Chinese: pien. In Indonesia, the scroll was made horizontally which is called the wayang beber and employed four performers: a man who sings the story, two men who operate the rolling of the scroll, and a woman who holds a lamp to illuminate particular pictures featured in the story. Other Indonesian theater forms, which are labelled as shadow play are the wayang kulit and wayang golek which uses rod puppetry, these are still performed today.
In Japan, Italian: cantastoria appears as Japanese: [[etoki]] (Japanese: 絵解) or Japanese: [[emaki]] (Japanese: 絵巻) in the form of hanging scrolls divided into separate panels, foreshadowing the popular modern manga, or Japanese comics. Japanese: Etoki sometimes took the shape of little booklets, or even displays of dolls posed on the roadside with backgrounds behind them. In the 20th century, Japanese candymen on bicycles would bring serial shows called Japanese: [[kamishibai]] (Japanese: 紙芝居) where the story was told on a series of changing pictures that slid in and out of an open-framed box. Some Japanese: kamishibai shows had a raree show element to them, where a viewer could pay extra to peer through a hole and see a supposed artifact from the story.
In 16th-century Italy, prayers would often be sung in the presence of illuminated scrolls while secular society produced the Italian: cantambanco or "singing bench" where a person would stand on a bench pointing to pictures with a stick.
In Spain up to the 19th century there were blind men who would be accompanied by a young helper who would make a living by going from town to town where they would display illustrations, and the blind man would recite or sing a story, often about crimes, while his helper pointed at the illustration relevant at that point. These were called "" (blind man stories).
The singing bench migrated northward to Central and Northern Europe where it served as sensationalist quasi-news about murder, fires, death, affairs, sex and scandals. Performers of such controversial bench songs were seen as vagrants and troublemakers and were often arrested, exiled, or ostracised for their activities.
In Germany itinerant balladeers performed German: Moritat or German: Bänkelsang (bench song) banner shows for four centuries until the Nazis banned the practice in the 1940s. The German German: Bänkelsang survives in Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (German: Die Dreigroschenoper) and in the performance work of Peter Schumann.
In Czechoslovakia banner shows were called Czech: kramářská píseň. Most of them have disappeared, with the notable exception of a parody song Cannoneer Czech: Jabůrek|nocat=y. In Hungary the term is called Hungarian: képmutogatás.