Moor's Head

A selection of the best Moor's heads created with the very elegant Caltagirone ceramics

The Moorish heads are an integral part of the great Sicilian tradition, on our shop you can find many types created with Caltagirone ceramics

Their story begins around the year 1000, while the Moors dominated Sicily, in the Kalsa Arab quarter in Palermo, where a beautiful girl lived. One day, from her balcony, she was noticed by a Moro passing by who, as soon as he saw her, fell in love with her immediately and immediately declared his love for her. The girl reciprocated the sentiment, but their love story ended very soon as the young girl discovered that the Moor had to return to the East where his wife and children awaited him. In the middle of the night the girl, who felt humiliated and betrayed, abandoned herself to a gesture of extreme jealousy and fatal anger, killing the Moor in his sleep. He then cut off his head, creating a vase in which he planted a basil sprout inside. Passers-by seeing this luxuriant plant, which was considered the herb of kings, immediately had terracotta vases made depicting the Moor's Heads.

Another version of the macabre legend was also written by Boccaccio in his Decameron, however setting the story in Messina, where Lisabetta, the protagonist, was a noble orphan girl jealously guarded by her brothers. Lisabetta fell in love with Lorenzo, a Pisan boy, and they carried on the story in great secrecy, but when the brothers discovered them, they put an end to the relationship by killing Lorenzo, and hiding his body. But Lorenzo, appearing to Lisabetta in a dream, told her that he had been killed and where he had been killed, so Lisabetta went to look for Lorenzo's body, and finding it, mad with pain, she cut off his head, hiding it in a vase. But the brothers, once they discovered the hidden head, immediately got rid of it, and Lisabetta died of a broken heart. Thus, today, the two unfortunate lovers meet again, figuratively, on the terraces of all Sicily, symbolized in pairs by the Moor's Heads.