The story behind the teste di moro is a love story that ends in murder: a woman finds out that the man she loves has another family to go back to, kills him in his sleep and uses his head as a pot, planting basil in it. It is set in Palermo, in the quarter the Arabs called al-Khālisa, at a time when Sicily was governed from the Islamic world.
That is the version told most often. It is not the only one, and the differences between them are not details: the killer changes, the motive changes, sometimes even the city. Here we line them up. Then we look at how much of the story is still readable on a head that has just come out of the kiln.
The version most people know
Palermo, around the eleventh century. The quarter is the Kalsa, from the Arabic al-Khālisa, "the chosen": the fortified citadel the emir Khalil had built in 937 to hold the court, the seat of government and the offices. Not just any neighbourhood, then, but the centre of power in a city that was among the most populous in the Mediterranean.
In a house with a balcony over the street lives a young woman who spends her time tending her plants. A man passes by, sees her, falls for her and finds a way to speak to her. She returns it. Then comes the news that ruins everything: he has a wife and children on the other side of the sea, and sooner or later he will go back to them.
What happens next is the part everyone remembers. She waits for night. When he is asleep she kills him, takes his head and makes a pot of it. She plants basil in it and sets the whole thing on the balcony, where it can be seen.
The meaning of the gesture is stated outright: if she cannot keep him alive, she keeps him anyway. The plant thrives, the neighbours notice and, not to be outdone, order pots of the same shape. From there, the story says, the object enters Sicilian houses and never leaves.
The versions do not agree, and that is worth saying
Anyone looking for "the true legend" runs into a simple fact: this is an oral story, so there is no original. It circulates in different forms, and the differences always fall in the same three places.
Who kills whom
In the most common version she kills him. In another it is her brothers, or her father, who discover the affair and punish it by killing both of the young people: in that case the two heads on display are those of both lovers, and the meaning changes deeply. It is no longer jealousy, it is a family refusing the match.
The motive
The wife waiting in the East is the explanation told most. Others circulate: that he had lied about who he was, or simply that he had to leave because his place was elsewhere. The moral colour of the story changes, and with it the meaning attached to the object.
The place
Palermo is the classic setting. In some variants the scene moves to other towns on the island, almost always towns with a strong ceramic tradition, for a fairly obvious reason: every place of production has an interest in saying it all started there.
Keats knew this story: Isabella, or the Pot of Basil
English readers have met this plot before, and probably in a poem.
In 1818 John Keats published Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. Isabella loves Lorenzo, who works for her three merchant brothers. They find out, take him out of the city and kill him. She finds the body, cuts off the head, hides it in a pot and plants basil over it, watering it with her tears until the brothers take that from her too. The Pre-Raphaelites turned it into a recurring subject: Holman Hunt and Millais both painted her over that pot.
Keats did not invent it. He was retelling the fifth novella of the fourth day of Boccaccio's Decameron, written in the fourteenth century and set in Sicily, in Messina. The core is identical to our legend with the roles moved: here the killers are the brothers, not the woman. Which is exactly the Sicilian variant in which the family punishes the two lovers.
This is not a footnote for scholars. It explains why the story took root so well in Sicily: it did not come from nowhere, it grafted onto something already in circulation, and it has been travelling for six centuries, long before anyone modelled it in clay.
From the legend to the object: two different dates
Here a point usually gets skipped.
The legend is set in the eleventh century. The ceramic testa di moro as we know it today is much more recent. They are two separate things and they get confused constantly, often in good faith, because it suits everyone to let the age of the story stand in for the age of the object.
The story comes from Islamic Sicily, that is from the two and a half centuries between the Arab landing of 827 and the arrival of the Normans. Sicilian maiolica as a technique matures much later, and the glazed head-shaped vase we now call a testa di moro belongs to a later phase again of workshop production.
What can be said with confidence is that the object has a history of its own, made of clay, kilns and hands, running alongside the story told without ever quite overlapping it.
What is left of the story on the piece for sale
This is the part that makes the legend useful rather than merely picturesque. On a head out of our workshop almost everything you can see points back to the story.
The hollow
It is the element nobody looks at and it explains all the rest. The head is hollow because in the story it had to hold a plant. It is not a sculpture scooped out at the top for convenience: it was born a container. Keeping it empty is no mistake, but it stays a vase.
The face and the expression
The features are worked by hand one at a time, which is why two heads of the same model never quite share a look. In the story the man comes from elsewhere and the woman is local: on the traditional lines that difference is still readable in the cut of the eyes and the mouth.
The crown
On the male face it declares rank: in nearly every version he is not an ordinary man. On the female face it becomes a diadem or a garland, lower and more densely decorated.
The fruit and the flowers
Pomegranates, lemons, prickly pears, roses, grapes. This is not generic ornament: it is what the land around Caltagirone produces, and it reads as a wish for abundance. The pomegranate, full of seeds, is the one tied across the whole Mediterranean to fertility.
Jewels, turban, necklaces
Earrings, necklaces, the wound turban: these are the marks of the East inside an object made in Sicily. It is the point where the legend says the most interesting thing it has to say, which is that this symbol comes out of an encounter and not a separation.
The colors
Cobalt blue, copper green, antimony yellow, manganese brown: the historical palette of Sicilian maiolica. The kaolin-based glazes they are laid over come from recipes of eastern origin, kept and handed down by the Arabs. Even the color, in other words, tells the same story as the subject.
Why there are two of them
The heads are almost always shown in twos, a man and a woman, and the reason becomes obvious once you have read the legend: they are the two characters. Keeping only one is not a mistake, and it is what many houses do for reasons of space. The pair carries an extra meaning though, and that is why it remains the classic Sicilian wedding present. We have written about it in giving a testa di moro.
Why the story is going around again
The heads never disappeared from Sicilian balconies, but in recent years they have left the island. Fashion put them on the runway, tourism made them the one image that stands for Sicily, travel photographs did the rest. The result is that many people now buy the object before they know the story, which is the exact opposite of how it used to work. That is not a bad thing, and it is the reason a page like this one is worth writing.
Common questions about the legend
Is the legend of the teste di moro a true story?
No, or at least there is no document tying the tale to events that actually happened. It is a legend, that is a narrative handed down by voice and written down in several different forms. The historical setting it takes place in, on the other hand, is real.
Why "moro"?
Because that is the male character in the story, and moro was the word Europe used, broadly, for the peoples of the southern shore of the Mediterranean. They did not use it of themselves: it was put on them from this side of the sea. The precise origin of the term is in what teste di moro mean.
Why basil in particular?
In the versions of the tale basil is the plant that grows in the head, and it is the same choice Boccaccio makes with Lisabetta. It has a strong scent, it grows fast and it does well in a pot. In the legend it serves to make a hidden thing visible: the better the plant does, the more people look at the vase.
Is the legend from Caltagirone or from Palermo?
The story is set in Palermo. Making the object in ceramic, on the other hand, is tied above all to Caltagirone, where working maiolica has been a town trade for centuries. Two histories that met at a certain point.
Do I need to know the legend to buy one?
No, but it changes what you are buying. Someone who knows it looks at the hollow, the crown and the fruit and understands why they are there. Someone who does not just sees a handsome vase.
Finding the story in the object
There is a simple way to tell whether any of this has been useful: stand in front of a head and try to trace the scenes on it. The hollow that was meant to hold the basil. The crown, declaring who he was. The pomegranates and the lemons, which come from the countryside around here. The testa di moro collection holds the pieces born in our workshop, in heights between 15 and 70 cm, roughly 6 to 27 inches, and each one holds those elements together in a combination of its own.
