Un-Mooring Race in Sicilian Folklore: The Tradition of “Testa di Moro”
by Laura Ingallinella
In the first episode of the second season of HBO’s The White Lotus, an award-winning series exploring human behavior and privilege in resorts around the world, two American couples walk into their adjoined suites at a luxury hotel in Sicily. Here, they see a colorful majolica vase depicting the head of a man wearing a crown, a turban, and a golden earring. This kind of vase, the concierge informs the guests, is called testa di moro, “Moor’s head,” and is surrounded by a piece of local folklore.
According to a legend set during Muslim rule of Sicily, a foreign man visiting Palermo — called moro (“Moor”) in all versions of the tale — fell in love with a local girl who spent her days looking after her plants. The two became lovers, but when the girl discovered that the man already had a wife and children overseas, she killed him in his sleep and cut off his head, which she used as a vase for a basil plant. Impressed with her thriving plant, the girl’s neighbors started producing vases in the shape of a testa di moro.
While in The White Lotus, the testa di moro serves as a suggestive local metaphor for the show’s concern with the transactional nature of desire, I suggest that these majolicas, their surrounding folklore, and the pleasure in their ownership and display testify to processes of racial commodification and self-exoticization. These processes are worth interrogating for several reasons: Sicily has a centuries-long history of complex negotiations with its African heritage (it was ruled, among others, by the Phoenicians, Aghlabids, and Fatimids), and it continuously reexamines its role as a locus of cross-cultural encounters and imperialistic fantasies. Moreover, the island is now at the center of anti-immigration rhetorics, with episodes of xenophobia and racism directed against migrants from Africa and the eastern Mediterranean — the very places teste di moro fetishize.
Contemporary Sicilian culture eagerly participates in the promotion of the macabre tale behind teste di moro. The comment Ethan Spiller (Will Sharpe) makes to the resort’s concierge — “What is with these head things? We keep seeing them everywhere!” — is on point. Teste di moro are ubiquitous in Sicily: they appear on the streets of Taormina, on the window displays of haute couture designers, in the homes of wealthy Sicilians.
Typically paired with a female head, teste di moro often establish a stark racial difference between the two lovers. The Moor’s perceived Arabness or Africanness are renegotiated within each artifact — a renegotiation that often results in hyper-racialized traits which caricature the man’s identity. Brightly colored turbans and large pieces of jewelry situate the man as Muslim; his skin is often pitch-black, and his lips are often so exaggerated that they are the only visible trait of his face. In contrast, the female head is often endowed with porcelain-white skin and elongated features; the racial boundaries of this iconography are permeable, however, and caricatural Black Africanness may also be featured on the female vase.
The earliest vases that can be described as teste di moro recorded by majolica scholars such as Antonino Ragona date to the late 1700s. While the actual origins of this iconography are unknown, they are to be found in Sicily’s position at the center of a Mediterranean network between antiquity and early modernity.
Whether by way of longue durée genealogy or antiquarian imitation, there is a direct line of continuity between teste di moro and the head-shaped vases produced in ancient Greece and Italy, which often depicted Black African youths. In the late Middle Ages, large and elaborate flower vases in polychrome majolica (called albahaquero from the Spanish word for “basil,” albahaca) became very popular in Spain and Morocco. Further into the early modern period, Europeans’ interest in the Ottoman Empire generated a robust demand for commodities that would allow for the consumption of a culture that inspired fear and fascination. Portraits of Ottoman men and women (whether authentic or based on European subjects dressed in Ottoman garb) were sought after in Venice, Florence, and elsewhere in Italy, including Sicily: majolica vases such as this one from early modern Palermo are a close antecedent to teste di moro.
In addition to these artistic influences, the early modern popularity of the testa di moro capitalized on the European fascination with the male Black body as a symbol of dominance over the Mediterranean. The artifact’s name originates from a much-coveted heraldic device — found almost everywhere in medieval and early modern Europe — depicting the profile of a Black man’s head, wearing either a headband or a crown. Well into the seventeenth century, Italian families found a source of pride in fantasizing about ancestors who had decapitated fierce Muslim soldiers in battle. A few decades before majolica artisans modeled the first teste di moro, for example, German goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer made a goblet in the shape of a Black man’s head for Carlo Albertinelli, a merchant whose family — the Florentine Pucci — sported a Moor’s head on their blazon.
Both iconographies infiltrated all aspects of early modern material culture, caught at the crossroads between idealization, commodification, and the sublimation of histories of domination. Early modern Sicily — where 1–3% of the population were enslaved Black Africans, and whose place in Mediterranean politics had been that of a Habsburg outpost against the Ottomans — was certainly far from immune to these stimuli, which must have facilitated the long-standing popularity of teste di moro in later years.
The legend which is typically supplied to explain the origin of these artifacts further works to turn them into an act of strategic self-exoticization. The tale’s setting in a distant past, during which Sicily was governed by Muslim rulers, allows Sicilian culture to romanticize and “other” its non-Christian genealogies on its own terms.
By virtue of this process, the local girl from the testa di moro tale turns into a literary site for the exploration of extreme passions. Modeled as a counterexample to Virgil’s Dido, she falls in love with a handsome foreigner akin to Aeneas. Unlike Dido, however, she elects murderous self-vindication over suicide once she learns that the foreigner must leave to fulfill his obligations; by decapitating him in his sleep, she re-enacts Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes.
Finally, the most crucial motif of the tale — the use of the lover’s head as a vase — is indebted to a famous tale from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1370). In this tale, three merchants working in Messina secretly murder one of their employees, Lorenzo, after discovering that he is having an affair with their unwed sister, Lisabetta. One night, Lorenzo’s ghost reveals to Lisabetta the location of his body. Unable to give him a proper burial, Lisabetta cuts off his head and places it inside a vase of basil. Similarly to the testa di moro folktale, the basil plant grows lush — partly because of the nutrients provided by Lorenzo’s decomposing head, partly because of the tears with which Lisabetta waters her vase. Eventually, the brothers discover why the girl is so attached to that plant and leave Sicily after hastily burying Lorenzo’s head. Lisabetta dies of grief, and not long passes before her story is made public and adapted into a well-known song. (In fact, Boccaccio did take inspiration from this canzone, in which a female voice laments the theft of a pot of basil, a metaphor for a lost lover.)
The tale of Lisabetta da Messina inaugurated the motif of the dismembered head placed into a vase and enjoyed several adaptations across regions and languages, such as the early modern murder ballad “The Bramble Briar,” which transferred the story to a village in Somerset. The folktale of teste di moro falls into this reception history, as attested by a more simple variant, in which the two lovers are decapitated as punishment for initiating an impossible interracial romance.
By appropriating Boccaccio’s exploration of Sicily as a locus of the macabre and projecting it onto the island’s premodern past under Muslim rule, the iconography and lore surrounding teste di moro inscribe fantasies of Mediterranean exchange within a commodified body that can be admired and reproduced for everyone to possess. Much like the port of Messina in Boccaccio’s tale (and others in the Decameron) or the resort in The White Lotus, the medieval Palermo of this folktale is a node within a broader maritime network. All three are places where peoples meet to trade in cultures, sex, and desire; if the exchange is unsatisfactory for one of the involved parties, they are also places in which one can also meet a violent end.
Rather than just killing her lover in a fit of vengeance, the girl from Palermo traps Mediterranean mobility within a protean mold of majolica. Instead of hiding her lover’s head in a vase like Lisabetta, she proudly showcases it on her porch: her act of disembodiment and appropriation generates a genealogy, as her peers will be able to emulate her and replicate teste di moro for their own benefit.
The White Lotus capitalizes on teste di moro as a suggestive metaphor but glosses over the racial genealogies that made this metaphor possible. These vases appear in the background of countless shots throughout the show, up to a climax in which one particular Moor’s head — together with the anxiety of sexual possession it encapsulates — is thrown to the ground and crashes into pieces. The metaphor serves the show’s American characters and viewership, and it meets their expectations of Sicily as an operatic space of uncontrolled jealousy and sexual desire. Once consumed, the metaphor can be forgotten and left behind.
However, attending to the iconography and lore of testa di moro as the result of two concurrent processes with premodern roots — the aestheticizing commodification of the Muslim body and a generative narrative of self-exoticization within a Mediterranean dimension — helps us problematize the history of an artifact that proves to be more than a beautiful piece of artisanship tied to a folkloric curiosity. Within a chain of creation, reproduction, and ownership, the displaced Muslim body becomes desirable only as a disembodied and sublimated commodity, to be pleasurably displayed in one’s garden or salotto — a stark contrast to the lived experience of other displaced non-European bodies living or passing through contemporary Sicily, such as those who find themselves at the center of current international disputes over Italy’s role in accepting migrants in the Mediterranean, those who are forced to work in the fields of the Sicilian countryside in conditions of near enslavement, and those who are working to build a better future for Black Italians despite structural racism and xenophobia.
Laura Ingallinella is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, and affiliated with the Renaissance Program at Victoria College. Her teaching and research attend to the intersection between identity politics, literature, and manuscript cultures in medieval and early modern Italy. In addition to articles on medieval and Renaissance Sicily, Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” and devotional literature in Italy and France, Prof. Ingallinella has worked on cross-regional mercantile literature, which is the subject of her forthcoming monograph, “Nations of the Book: Trade, Travel, and Transcultural Literacy in the Early Renaissance (1350–1500).” She is now working on the intersection of imperialism, gender, and race in Renaissance Italian drama.
