While visiting the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne a few days ago I came across an old friend: William Holman Hunt’s 1868 painting, Isabella and the Pot of Basil, titled after John Keats' narrative poem of 1818. Now, to be honest, I never read Keats’ poem in its entirety (I promise I will soon), but the reason this image is an old friend is that the English Keats based his work on a short story by the Italian Giovanni Boccaccio included in the latter’s Decameron of 1350 and often anthologized in Italian schoolbooks. I remember Hunt’s painting in illustrations from my high school days, and I show it to my Italian Food Culture students whenever we read this story.
Basil has been consumed in Asia for thousands of years but although it came to Italy during ancient Roman times, it has been used in cooking only for the past three hundred years or so. I love large amounts of basil briefly sautéed with fresh cherry tomatoes and garlic and served on pasta. I love its fresh leaves added to salad, or pizza, or anything, really… Dried basil is useless and I do *not* love pesto, all too often made to dispose of basil’s brief summer bounty and frozen or jarred. Pesto is a shortcut to add flavor, yes, but not usually a delicious flavor. Give me fresh basil or no basil at all.
But I digress. Let's go back to our story.
Boccaccio's protagonist is named Lisabetta, has three brothers, and lives in Messina, in Sicily; Keats' Isabella has two brothers and lives in Florence. The wealthy young woman (the stories are basically the same, so I will call her Lisabetta) falls in love with one of her brothers' employees, Lorenzo, and when the liaison is discovered, Lisabetta’s brothers kill Lorenzo. (Keats' lovers are caught before they get to consummate their relationship, whereas Boccaccio's have been enjoying each other’s bodies and are caught in flagrante.) Lisabetta learns of her lover's fate in a dream, exhumes his body, cuts off his head, and plants it in a pot of basil, which she waters with her tears, obsessively. The basil, needless to say, thrives, but the young woman pines away. Perplexed by their sister's odd behavior, the brothers unearth Lorenzo's head and, afraid that their crime is discovered, flee the city, taking with them the pot of basil with Lorenzo’s head in it (evidence of the murder). Forever separated from her beloved, Lisabetta dies.
Lisabetta's story is not a fairy tale: Boccaccio wrote realistic short stories and not fairytales. Still, this author's one-hundred--tale collection was instrumental in the popularity in Europe of the short story (known as “novella”), which was the the genre out of which Italian fairytales --the oldest in Europe--emerged.