Legend of the Baroness of Carini
The legend of the Baroness of Carini is a true story, which tells a tragic story that took place in the castle of Carini.
The story tells of Baroness of Carini , Laura, daughter of Baron Cesare Lanza di Trabia, who, at the behest of her father, married Baron Vincenzo II La Grua at the age of 14. < br> At first the couple went to live in Palermo where their first two children were born, a girl and a boy, later they moved to Carini castle where another six children were born. However, the Baron of Carini was a new man, dominated by his father-in-law, he neglected his young wife, dedicating her time to taking care of her properties.
In those years, the La grua and Vernagallo families were on excellent terms and there were frequent their contacts, to the point that Laura, disappointed in her married life, found love in Ludovico Vernagallo, and became his lover. The relationship lasted fourteen years.
Discovered by her husband and father, Laura and Ludovico were killed in the castle of Carini on December 4, 1563. In the throes of death, the Baroness slipped on the ground leaving the indelible imprint of her bloody hand on the wall of the room.
The legend tells that since that day in the large halls of the castle muffled cries have been heard at night.
Throughout history this sad story has always aroused interest and curiosity. The story of the Baroness of Carini struck the sensibility of the people to the point of being reported by the " orbi ", that is the storytellers who went around all Sicily, so called because they were often blind.Towards the middle of the 1800s, Salomone Marino, a physician and anthropologist from Palermo, hearing some verses being sung to his mother, began to do research to try to reconstruct the historical story of the Baroness of Carini, finding almost 400 variants of the dedicated poem to the sad story .
In 2010 the mayor of Carini hired an internationally renowned team of criminologists , the ICAA, to officially reopen the case of the death of Baroness di Carini. As a result of all these researches and studies conducted it is believed that other facts must be added to the more popular version, the one that sees the husband surprising his wife and lover together, and her father killing her to restore the family honor. . In fact, it is believed that Vincenzo La Grua suspected that the children born to Laura after the transfer to Carini were not his children. To prevent the inheritance from passing to an illegitimate child, since the firstborn born before the transfer to Carini had died at the age of 15, the only solution plotted with the father-in-law was to kill Laura, making use of the law of the time that it allowed the father to kill his daughter and lover if found in flagrant adultery. After the death of his wife Vincenzo La Grua he disinherited his children and entrusted them to his murderous father-in-law, then remarried immediately afterwards. After the investigations were concluded, however, the doubts do not seem completely dispelled, and the tomb of the unfortunate baroness has not yet been found.
