Lisabetta

Lisabetta is the young heroine of a story in which private love is first concealed, then violently suppressed, and finally preserved in a pot of basil. Her brothers’ murder of Lorenzo leaves her with no public remedy or power to recover him; she turns instead to the secret acts of tending, weeping, and remembering that end in her death. Told by Filomena, Lisabetta’s story makes the cost of family control visible through a chain of intimate losses.

Identity and circumstances

Lisabetta lives in Messina with her three brothers, merchants who inherited great wealth from their father, a man from San Gimignano. She is described as beautiful and well-mannered, but her brothers have not yet married her. That circumstance places her within a household whose decisions about her future are made by her family, while the story gives no account of her own marriage plans.

Lorenzo, a handsome and agreeable young man from Pisa, works in one of the brothers’ warehouses and manages their business affairs. His position brings him into the household’s orbit, but the relationship that develops between him and Lisabetta remains private. Their attraction is mutual: she comes to desire him, he notices her attention and turns his thoughts to her, and they eventually pursue the intimacy they both want.

Love and its discovery

The lovers continue their relationship in secret, but one night Lisabetta goes to Lorenzo’s room and is seen by her eldest brother. He tells the other two what he witnessed. Rather than confront his sister or Lorenzo at once, the brothers discuss the matter and decide to conceal their knowledge until they can remove what they consider a source of shame without injury to themselves or Lisabetta. Their apparent silence is not acceptance: it gives them time to plan.

The brothers later take Lorenzo with them on the pretext of a pleasure outing beyond the city. At a lonely, remote place, they kill him while he is off his guard and bury him where no one knows. Returning to Messina, they say that they have sent him away on business. Because they often dispatch him on their affairs, the explanation seems credible. The false account exploits the very work that had connected Lorenzo to the household and delays Lisabetta’s understanding of what has happened.

The dream and the pot of basil

When Lorenzo does not return, Lisabetta repeatedly asks her brothers about him. One answers with a threat, demanding to know why she keeps asking and warning that further questions will bring an answer she deserves. She stops asking aloud, but privately calls for Lorenzo at night, weeps over his absence, and waits for him. The story presents her distress not as a passing suspicion but as a grief that grows under uncertainty and intimidation.

After a night of lamenting, she dreams that Lorenzo appears pale, disordered, and dressed in torn, decayed clothes. He tells her that her brothers killed him on the last day she saw him and points out where they buried his body. He also tells her not to call for him or expect his return. The dream gives her the knowledge her brothers have withheld, and she goes to the place he indicated with a household servant who knows the family’s affairs.

Lisabetta clears away the dead leaves and digs where the earth seems less hard. Finding Lorenzo’s body confirms the dream. She wishes she could carry away the whole body for proper burial, but cannot; instead, she cuts off his head, wraps it in a napkin, and brings it home concealed in her maid’s lap. In her locked chamber she weeps over it, kisses it, and places it, wrapped in linen, in a large pot. She covers it with earth and plants fine basil from Salerno above it. She waters the plant with her tears, rose water, and orange-flower water, and sits gazing at the pot as the place where Lorenzo remains hidden.

The basil grows beautiful and unusually fragrant, nourished, the tale says, by her constant care and the richness of the earth in which the head lies. The pot thus holds together two forms of attachment: the living plant she can tend and the lover whose body has been denied burial and whose death she cannot reverse. Her attention gives grief a daily practice, but not an escape from it.

Loss and narrative significance

Neighbours notice Lisabetta’s diminished appearance and swollen-looking eyes, and tell her brothers that she sits by the pot every day. Her brothers reproach her, then secretly remove it. When she discovers it is gone, she repeatedly begs for its return and will not stop lamenting. She falls ill and asks for nothing but the pot. Her brothers eventually empty it and find the cloth and Lorenzo’s head; his curled hair allows them to recognize him. Fearing that the truth will become public, they bury the head and secretly leave Messina for Naples.

Lisabetta continues to mourn and dies weeping, her love ending not in reunion or justice but in the loss of the last object that connected her to Lorenzo. After the story becomes known, someone makes a song about the stolen pot, and it remains sung. The ending carries Lisabetta’s private grief beyond the household that tried to suppress it: the brothers can remove the basil and leave the city, but the story and song preserve the knowledge of what they did.

Filomena tells the tale as part of a collection presented as solace for women in love, whose constrained lives can leave them with fewer ways to divert or relieve sorrow than men have. Lisabetta’s chamber and her repeated vigil beside the pot give that framing a stark, particular form. Her actions are limited, but they are not empty: she seeks Lorenzo’s body, makes a memorial from what she can carry away, and sustains it through daily care. The narrative’s final movement—from a hidden head, to a seized pot, to a song known by many—turns the object of her grief into a lasting record of both her attachment and the violence that silenced it.