The pot of basil

The pot of basil is the vessel in which Lisabetta hides Lorenzo’s head after his brothers have killed him. Filled with earth and planted with basil, it becomes both a concealed memorial and the focus of her daily mourning; when her brothers take it away, the loss of this private refuge deepens into illness and death, while the story of the pot passes into song.

A vessel made into a memorial

After finding Lorenzo’s body where her dream had directed her, Lisabetta takes his head away, wraps it in a linen cloth, and places it in a large, handsome pot of the kind used for marjoram or sweet basil. She covers it with earth and plants several basil shoots, choosing seeds from Salerno. What ordinarily holds a living herb now conceals the remains of her lover, making the pot a domestic container for a grief she cannot openly share.

Lisabetta waters the basil with her tears, rose water, and orange-flower water. She sits beside the pot and gazes at it as at the place where Lorenzo is hidden; after looking for a long while, she bends over it and weeps until the leaves are wet. Her repeated care gives the plant a striking vitality: the basil grows exceptionally beautiful and fragrant, nourished, the narration says, by her constant tending and by the richness of the earth within the pot.

Discovery and removal

Lisabetta’s neighbors notice her repeated vigil, her wasted appearance, and eyes changed by weeping, and report what they have seen to her brothers. The brothers first rebuke her, but when she does not stop, they secretly have the pot taken from her. Its removal makes the concealed memorial visible through its absence: Lisabetta repeatedly demands its return, will not cease lamenting when it is withheld, and falls sick, asking for nothing else.

The brothers, puzzled by her insistence, turn out the earth and find the cloth and Lorenzo’s head. They recognize him by his curled hair. Fearing that the discovery will become widely known, they bury the head and secretly leave Messina for Naples. Their departure removes the evidence and the pot from the household, but it cannot undo the grief that the object had contained.

From private grief to song

Without the pot, Lisabetta continues to lament and dies weeping. The pot’s significance thus lies not only in what it hides, but in the repeated acts of looking after it, watering it, and mourning beside it: those acts give her loss a visible form until her brothers interrupt them. The basil, beautiful and fragrant through her care, stands in painful contrast to the violence concealed beneath its soil.

After the affair becomes known to many, someone makes a song about the stolen pot, and the song is still sung. The vessel that had sheltered Lisabetta’s private remembrance becomes the subject of a shared lament. Its removal ends her access to Lorenzo’s hidden remains, but carries the story beyond the closed room and into public memory.