Macalda di Scaletta

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Macalda di Scaletta
Baroness of Ficarra
Macalda (right) and Alaimo (center)
Coat of arms
Born	circa 1240 Castle of Scaletta
Died	after October 14, 1308? Castle Matagrifone, Messina
Noble family	Lentini
Spouse(s)	Guglielmo Amico Alaimo da Lentini
Issue	Tommaso, Alanfranco (second marriage)
Father	Giovanni di Scaletta
Mother	a noblewoman of the Cottone family
Occupation	Countess consort of Buccheri, Butera, Odogrillo, and Palazzolo Acreide

Macalda di Scaletta (or Machalda; c. 1240 in Scaletta Zanclea – after October 14, 1308? in Messina) was a Sicilian baroness and lady-in-waiting during the Angevin and Aragonese periods. The daughter of Giovanni di Scaletta and a Sicilian noblewoman, Macalda was noted for her political conduct, inclination to betray marriage (political and human), and for her promiscuous sexual habits; because of this dissoluteness, even having a brush with "suspicion of incest," tended to morph into an "exhibitionism veined with nymphomania."^{[citation needed]} She was the wife of the Grand Justiciar of the Kingdom of Sicily, Alaimo da Lentini [it].

Reportedly ambitious, judicious, and educated in matters of the military, Macalda deployed her influence first in the circle of Charles of Anjou and then at the court of Peter III of Aragon, whom, according to a chronicler of the time^[who?], Macalda tried to seduce, but without success. She lived in a time of^[when?] upheavals in the Kingdom of Sicily, which were marked by the bloody revolt of the Sicilian Vespers, and which led to the change from Angevin to Aragonese rule.

Practicing intrigue at court, but also vying with Queen Constance of Hohenstaufen^[how?], Macalda had a role in at first favoring, and then toppling, the political fortunes of her second husband, the Alaimo da Lentini, who had been one of the major champions of the Sicilian Vespers.

Macalda's career has left behind a recognizable historical trace, though variously treated in the chronicles of her time. One of these, the Historia Sicula by the contemporaneous Messinese chronicler Bartholomaeus of Neocastro, is aggressive towards her character^[how?], but some suspect that the political motives influencing the pro-Aragonese Neocastro may not have been the only factor in his bitterness towards Macalda, and that he was "one of the victims of the woman's spell."^{[citation needed]}

Besides her military education, Macalda is also noted for her ability to play chess, which was unusual for a woman of her time, and historical evidence suggests that she was probably the first person in Sicily who learned how to play it.^[1]

Her singular figure, inhabiting the pages of chronicle and history, is transfigured in the collective memory, in folklore, and in the collective imagination. Macalda became the protagonist of popular traditions, myths, and legends of Sicily, such as one in Catania about the well of Gammazita.

A distant echo of Macalda's passion for the Aragonese sovereign, which the chronicler Neocastro disseminated in caustic tones, also seems to reverberate in Boccaccio's storytelling, with an enormous difference of tones and accents, in a much more idealized and rarefied courtly and knightly context in the Decameron: the tale of Lisa Puccini's love for King Peter of Raona (Aragon).