Messina

Messina is the setting of the tragic episode of Lisabetta and Lorenzo, where a wealthy merchant family’s effort to suppress a love affair turns the city into the starting point of a chain of concealment, discovery, and loss. In Filomena’s telling, Messina is not merely a place-name: it is the home from which the brothers’ household is broken apart and the setting from which Lisabetta’s grief becomes known beyond the family.

Setting and Household

Filomena introduces the story by recalling that the case occurred in Messina. There, three young merchant brothers had inherited great wealth from their father, a man from San Gimignano. Their sister, Lisabetta, was fair and well-mannered, but the brothers had not yet arranged her marriage. The household’s prosperity and commercial activity shape the circumstances of the story: Lorenzo, a handsome and agreeable young man from Pisa, worked in their warehouse and managed their business affairs.

Messina’s role in the episode is thus closely tied to the brothers’ home and workplace. Lisabetta and Lorenzo’s relationship develops within the orbit of the family business, where their repeated encounters allow mutual attraction to grow. The city is also the place where the brothers try to contain the consequences of that relationship, first by hiding Lorenzo’s disappearance and later by leaving when their concealment fails.

The Love Affair and the Brothers’ Crime

Lisabetta and Lorenzo gradually become attached to one another. Once they are assured of each other’s feelings, they begin a secret relationship. Their secrecy fails when the eldest brother sees Lisabetta going to Lorenzo’s room one night. He tells his brothers the next morning, and after deliberating, they decide to keep what they know quiet while considering how to remove what they regard as a source of shame.

The brothers carry Lorenzo out of the city under the pretense of a pleasure excursion. In a lonely, remote place, they kill him while he is off his guard and bury him, then return to Messina and claim that they have sent him elsewhere on business. Their familiar practice of dispatching Lorenzo on commercial errands makes the explanation credible. The city’s ordinary rhythms of trade and travel thereby help disguise a murder: his absence can initially pass as another journey undertaken for the brothers’ affairs.

Discovery, Flight, and Aftermath

Lorenzo appears to Lisabetta in a dream and reveals where he has been buried. She secretly goes to the place, finds his body, and takes his head. At home, she hides it in a pot of basil, which she tends and mourns over continually. Neighbors notice her wasting appearance and tell her brothers that she weeps over the pot every day. Their attempts to reprimand her do not stop her grief, so they secretly take the pot away.

When the brothers empty it, they find Lorenzo’s head wrapped in cloth and recognize him by his curled hair. Afraid that the murder will become known, they bury the head and leave Messina for Naples. Lisabetta repeatedly asks for her pot, falls ill, and dies still lamenting its loss. Her death closes the family’s effort to erase the affair, while the brothers’ flight marks the point at which the violence they concealed drives them out of the city. In time the story becomes public, and a song about the stolen pot is made and continues to be sung.

Narrative Significance

Messina gives the tale a concrete domestic and commercial setting, but its most decisive movement is outward: Lorenzo’s hidden death is carried back into the household through Lisabetta’s mourning, and then beyond the household through the discovery, the brothers’ departure, and the song. Filomena places the account after a story that also evokes Messina, using the place as a point of narrative return before turning to another grievous love. The city consequently links private tragedy to public remembrance: what the brothers try to bury there survives in the story and song that follow.