The late August heat wrapped around the Villetta like a heavy blanket, scented with resin and ripe figs. Following the destruction of Shimmy in London, an almost magical silence had descended upon the house, as if a lingering layer of electrical static had finally been cleared away. Belinda spent her mornings in the workshop, surrounded by skeins of silk and raw linen, while her mind often drifted back to the legend that, more than any other, embodied the fierce and transformative soul of her land: the myth of the Teste di Moro—the Moorish Heads.
In Sicily, those colorful ceramics adorning every balcony were not merely decorations. They were the memory of a passion that had turned into vengeance, and then into art. The story told of a young maiden from the Kalsa district in Palermo who fell in love with a young Moor. When she discovered he was planning to leave her to return to the East to his wives, she killed him in his sleep, beheading him to create a vase in which to plant basil. That basil grew so lush, nourished by the girl's tears and the power of betrayal, that all the neighbors desired similar vases for themselves.
Belinda reflected on how much that myth resembled her own life. She, too, had taken the remains of a painful past—the severed heads of Grandpa Giovanni's ambitions and the silence of the women in her family—to transform them into something fertile. Her workshop, Il Faro, was her basil pot: a place where pain was transformed into beauty through embroidery.
That afternoon, Elia entered the workshop carrying a basket of freshly picked lemons. Belinda's gaze fell upon an old dishcloth that Anna, her mother-in-law, had left in a drawer years before. It depicted two faces: a Moor and a maiden, but their eyes were not filled with hatred; instead, they shared a strange, profound understanding.
"Your mother used this symbol often, didn't she?" Belinda asked, tracing the contours of the embroidery.
Elia sat beside her, resting his calloused hands on his knees. His face, usually reserved, softened at the memory. "My mother used to say that the Moorish Heads weren't a warning against betrayal, but a lesson on the protection of life. There's a story I've never told you, Belinda. It's about me, and the reason I've always had this almost visceral bond with the earth and the dry-stone walls."
Belinda stopped embroidering, captivated by the tone of Elia's voice. It was a moment of sharing, one of those silent magics that happened when the Wheel turned in the right direction.
Elia began to tell of when he was a small boy, fragile and constantly plagued by fevers that doctors could not explain. Anna, a woman of few words but immense ancestral wisdom, understood that her son's illness was not of the body, but of the spirit: the child could not "anchor" himself to reality, as if his soul were drifting too far from the Sicilian soil.
One August night, much like the one they were experiencing now, Anna decided to perform a rite that went beyond religion and touched upon the magic of the Moors—that ancient knowledge carried by the desert winds centuries before. She took a large ceramic Moorish Head, a family relic said to contain earth taken directly from the garden of the Kalsa.
Anna carried Elia, who was only four years old at the time, beneath the great centuries-old olive tree that dominated their property. She used no medicine, only silk threads and earth. While the child burned with fever, Anna began to embroider a small amulet directly onto her son's nightshirt. She used an ancient stitch, the stem stitch (punto erba), but she wove it following a pattern that resembled the crowns of the Moors.
As she embroidered, Anna whispered to the earth. Elia vaguely remembered the cold sensation of the mud his mother smeared on the soles of his feet while she recited a chant that blended Sicilian dialect with forgotten Arabic words. She said that to stay alive in that land, one had to accept being a part of it, just like the basil in the Kalsa maiden's vase.
Anna's magic lay in binding Elia's destiny to that of the earth. She metaphorically "sewed" her son's spirit to the roots of the olive tree. That night, the fever vanished suddenly. Elia woke up the next morning with a new strength in his arms and an uncontrollable urge to touch stones, to dig in the mud, to build. Anna explained to him that the Moor's head represented the sacrifice necessary for beauty to grow: one had to "cut away" the weak part of oneself to allow the strength of nature to sprout.
"From that day on," Elia continued, looking Belinda in the eyes, "I was never afraid of the dark or of exhaustion again. When I touch stones to build a wall, I feel the heartbeat of the earth. My mother gave me a root, Belinda. She taught me that magic isn't something that flies away, but something you plant and tend to every day."
Belinda listened, enthralled. She understood now why Elia was so solid, so capable of withstanding the emotional storms that often overwhelmed her. Anna had used the wisdom of the Moors to save her son, transforming a legend of death into a ritual of grounding and life.
This revelation sparked a new intuition for Belinda's work. She would no longer embroider only flowers and symbols of the Wheel; she would introduce the magic of the Moors into the Il Faro collection. She would create a line dedicated to protection and strength, using the colors of the earth, gold, and the deep blue of the Mediterranean.
The bond between her and Elia grew even tighter in that moment. Both were children of women who had fought with the means they had—thread, earth, silence—to protect their loved ones from the shadows of a difficult legacy. Caterina and Anna, though different, were two sides of the same coin: the wisdom that transforms destiny.
As the sun set behind the imposing silhouette of Mount Etna, tinting the sky a red that recalled the fire of the Moors, Belinda took up a new piece of linen. She began to trace the profile of a Moorish Head, but at the base of the ceramic, she drew deep roots intertwining with the symbols of the Wheel of the Year.
It was the perfect synthesis of their journey. Sicily was no longer just a place of secrets and greed, but a land of alchemical transformation. The sacrifice of the past had served to nourish the present, just as the Moor's blood had nourished the most fragrant basil in the world.
Belinda felt ready. August 29th, Azzurra's birthday, was approaching, and with it, the need to protect the child—no longer by running from the shadow, but by teaching her to plant her dreams in the right vase. The magic of the Moors was now part of her arsenal, an ancient force that shimmered and shone in the darkness of the workshop, ready to protect the Villetta from any new return of the darkness.
That evening, Elia and Belinda dined outdoors, under the same olive tree where Anna had performed her rite years before. The wind carried the scent of the sea and the promise that beauty, if nourished with truth, would never wither. The saga continued, but the protagonists were no longer pawns of an ancient fate; they were the artisans of their own light.