Image: Ellen Wagner

Why Villa Thisbe?

Thisbe was one half of the famous "Pyramus and Thisbe" duo featured in myths starting with Ovid's Metamorphoses on to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and, more recently, the American musical The Fantastiks.

Pyramus and Thisbe are engaged in a love affair that is doomed from the outset. Despite parental censure, they arrange an assignation behind a mausoleum, not perhaps the most propitious place for such a meeting. Pyramus is late, and while waiting for him Thisbe sees a lion and flees, dropping her shawl. The lion finds the garment and rips it with bloodied claws. Pyramus arrives and cannot find his lover. He discovers her bloodstained shawl and, believing that the lion has fatally savaged Thisbe, falls on his sword. His blood splashes on a nearby white mulberry tree that is laden with “snow-white fruit”. Thisbe, finding her lover dead beside her bloody shawl, realises with horror what must have happened and uses his sword to take her own life.

The two bodies were buried in one sepulchre, and the tree ever after brought forth purple berries.