Once I was invited to the wedding of my Sicilian friends, who were living abroad for work. I wasn’t sure what to give Sicilians who undoubtedly missed home. In the end, I chose two Teste di Moro paintings. At first I wondered if they were just a tourist cliché, but they absolutely loved them. They even took the paintings back to Sicily and hung them in their bedroom.
No matter which town in Sicily you visit, you’re bound to come across images or ceramic heads of a man and a woman. For Sicilians, this is a tradition that was born almost a thousand years ago in the Arab district of Kalsa in Palermo. There are two legends behind it.
The first tells the story of a Sicilian girl and a young Arab man who fell in love. One day, however, she discovered that he already had a wife and children and would soon be returning home. So while he was asleep, she cut off his head. She turned it into a flower pot and planted basil in it – a symbol of love and prosperity in Sicily. She placed the pot on her balcony and watered it every day with her tears. The basil grew so beautifully that the neighbours believed the secret lay in the unusual pot. Soon they began asking local potters to make ceramic flower pots shaped like human heads.
The second legend says that the girl belonged to a noble Sicilian family. When she fell in love with an Arab man, her parents could not accept their relationship and had both lovers executed. Their heads were then displayed on the balcony as a warning. I don’t really like this version, but I wanted to include it because it explains why there are two heads instead of one.