News from Italy
Step by step Italy with Vita gazette: its treasures, secrets, legends, and fascinating places.
Palermo: The nuns and the legends
When a traveler arriving in Palermo looked out the porthole of an airplane, would see the image of a city lying placidly, as on a spring day, on the shores of a colorful sea degrading from crystalline green to intense blue, an elegant, aristocratic lady. Palermo is a city beautiful and complex; full of history, culture, art that here find their own and unique expression. Like the Palermo dialect, every aspect of this city is made up of openings and of closures; light and dark. It is world and island at the same time. A city with a great oratory tradition whose documentary history is embellished with elements, secrets and mysteries that come alive with details as they are whispered from mouth to mouth in the alleys that develop and wrap around wonderful squares. There is no place, work of art, palace or monument in Palermo that is not interested even from the smallest ancient or recent legend that may be. Like the one about the nun of the Teatro Massimo.
The nun of the Teatro Massimo
To create this magnificent architectural and engineering work, the largest opera house in Italy and the third in Europe for architectural size, it was necessary to demolish four churches, two monasteries and one of the access gates to the city. During the construction works, it seems that the tomb of a nun was desecrated: it is thought the first Mother Superior of the convent called the nun. The wrath of this is said then hurled itself on the theater whose works lasted 23 years with not a few difficulties. It would seem that the frontal inscription of the theater: “Room of the scenes is the crime”, was created precisely to appease the wrath of the nun. It is also said that anyone who is skeptical of this story stumbles upon a particular step called “the nun’s step”. Some claim to have even seen the shadow of the nun wandering restlessly inside the theater. Even if it were true, how to blame the nun? Turning off the lights, quieting the buzz of the spectators, stopped the music, you could enjoy the magnificence of the entire architectural apparatus created by Giovan Battista Filippo Basile and completed on his death by his son Ernesto Basile; of the movable ceiling composed of frescoed wooden panels, called petals, which allow the ventilation of the internal environment; or for the refined decorations of the boxes and furnishings by Ducrot; and again the slight asymmetry of the rotunda at noon, the room originally reserved for men only, specially commissioned by the architect to obtain a very special acoustic resonance so that from the outside it is impossible to understand what is said from the inside.
A nun, again, is the protagonist of the legend that affects the neighborhood behind the Teatro Massimo, il Capo. An ancient, colorful and lively neighborhood. Animated during the day by a very popular market, that of the Capo to be precise, where the scents of the products displayed on the stalls mix with the screams of the vendors who in this way attract passers-by. Where popular tradition and history mix. Past and present coexist. A very ancient neighborhood profoundly transformed in 1600 by urban expansion and thus becoming, at the time, one of the four districts, neighborhoods, of the city. A crucial neighborhood during some historical moments of Palermo. From the bell tower of one of the many churches in this area, the Chiesa della Mercede, it is said that a nun looks out every night. The legend tells the sad story of a young woman who, following a violence, gave birth to a girl who was taken from her before forcing her to lock herself up in a convent. Upon learning that her daughter had been placed in service at Palazzo Serenario, located in front of the Mercede Church, the nun climbed the bell tower every night to look at her. There are those who say that on some nights it is still possible to see it.
Another story, no less full of compelling mystery, involves the Chief: that of the Beati Paoli. When already in 1600 the district of the Capo was urbanistically redesigned, it was inhabited by the small and middle class whose houses were built close to the many churches and houses of brotherhoods. The Beati Paoli were an active brotherhood around 1180 whose members were thought to be citizens who belonged to the lower classes of society whose desire was to take revenge on nobles and feudal owners. Legend has it that at night these wandered the streets with their heads covered by a black hood and, having identified the victim, they led her to their secret court located under the market of the head to try and kill her. In fact, a large underground space, visible today from the Vicolo degli Orfani, exists. Behind the Church of Santa Maruzza, there is a large cavity which looks like a cave with seats carved out along the walls, like a sirocco chamber. Probably the owners of Palazzo Baldi located just above it, used it as such.
These are only a very small part of the stories and legends that belong to Palermo. And if after crossing the alleys of the Capo and enjoying the magnificence of the Teatro Massimo, you wish to eat a Frutta Martorana, well, you should know that it too is not devoid of legend and mystery.
Neither are the very famous “Moor’s heads” that can be admired from the windows of the master potters who meet along the streets of Palermo and they are not even … but this is a mystery.