Lisabetta Unearths Lorenzo’s Head and Hides It in a Pot of Basil

Lisabetta Unearths Lorenzo’s Head and Hides It in a Pot of Basil is the story’s turn from concealed murder to private, material mourning. When Lorenzo’s absence stretches on, Lisabetta’s search leads not to his return but to the discovery of what her brothers have done. Unable to give him a proper burial, she takes his head and makes a basil pot its hiding place. The object keeps her attachment present in the household, until her brothers remove it and her grief ends in death.

The Dream and the Discovery

Lorenzo’s brothers have killed him in a remote place while the three of them were out together, then buried him where no one would know. Back in Messina, they explain his absence by saying they have sent him away on business, a story made plausible by their practice of dispatching him on their errands. Lisabetta repeatedly asks after him. One brother warns her that further questions will bring an answer she deserves, and she stops asking, but continues to mourn and call for Lorenzo at night.

After a night of lament, Lorenzo appears to her in a dream, pale, disordered, and wearing rent, mouldering clothes. He tells her that her brothers killed him on the last day she saw him, identifies the place where they buried him, and tells her not to keep calling for him or expecting his return. Lisabetta wakes in tears and believes the vision. The dream changes her grief from anxious waiting into a search for the body: what she could not learn by questioning her brothers is disclosed by the murdered man himself.

The next morning, afraid to confront her brothers, she obtains permission to go a little way outside the city for recreation. She goes to the place Lorenzo indicated with a companion who had formerly served the brothers and knew her affairs. Clearing away dead leaves, she digs where the ground seems less hard and soon finds Lorenzo’s body. It has not yet changed or rotted, and its condition confirms what the dream revealed. She would carry the whole body away to give it a more fitting burial, but cannot. Instead, she cuts off his head with a knife, wraps it in a napkin, and places it in her maid’s lap. She covers the remaining body with earth and returns home unseen.

The Head in the Basil Pot

In her chamber, Lisabetta weeps over the head for a long time, bathing it with tears and kissing it repeatedly. She then places it, wrapped in a fine linen cloth, inside a large, handsome pot of the kind used for marjoram or sweet basil. She covers it with earth and plants basil heads in the soil. From then on, she waters the plant only with her tears, rose water, or orange-flower water. The care she gives the pot makes tending it an extension of mourning: she sits beside it, gazes at it as the hiding place of Lorenzo, and bends over it to weep.

The basil grows exceptionally well, becoming handsome and sweet-smelling. The account connects its flourishing to Lisabetta’s assiduous care and to the richness of the earth made fertile by the rotting head. The pot therefore holds two kinds of presence at once: the concealed remains that Lisabetta alone knows are there, and the living plant that makes her attachment visible to others. Her tears are both an expression of grief and part of the routine by which the secret is sustained.

The Pot Is Taken

Lisabetta’s neighbors see her sitting by the pot day after day. They report her conduct to her brothers, remarking on her wasting beauty and eyes that seem to have disappeared from weeping. Her brothers reprove her more than once, but she does not stop. They then have the pot secretly taken from her. Its removal exposes how completely her daily life has gathered around this one object: she repeatedly and urgently demands its return, and when it is withheld, she continues lamenting until she falls sick.

Even in her illness, Lisabetta asks for nothing except the basil pot. The brothers, astonished by her persistence, decide to find out what it contains. They turn out the earth and discover the cloth and the head within it. Though decayed, the head is still recognizable by its curled hair as Lorenzo’s. What Lisabetta had hidden in a domestic planting vessel is thus revealed to the people who had concealed the murder itself.

Loss, Flight, and the Song

The brothers are deeply alarmed and fear that the murder will become known. They bury the head and secretly leave Messina, arranging their departure before going to Naples. Their response repeats the concealment that followed Lorenzo’s killing: instead of answering for the violence, they remove its trace and withdraw from the city. But the pot’s discovery cannot restore Lisabetta’s private refuge or undo the loss it contained.

Deprived of the pot and still asking for it, Lisabetta dies weeping. Her love ends in the same relentless lament that had first followed Lorenzo’s disappearance, while the brothers’ flight leaves her without either the lover or the object through which she kept him close. Later, once the matter becomes known to many, someone makes a song about the stolen pot, and the story gives its opening lament. The hidden head has been buried again, but the loss passes beyond the chamber: the pot that held Lisabetta’s grief becomes the subject through which others remember it.