In summer, a historical reenactment celebrates the figure of Beatrice with costumed parades, handcrafted illuminations, and banquets along the streets, while the echo of her virtues still resounds through the alleys. Thus, between myth and reality, the legend of the Beautiful Lady of the Castle continues to give Delia an aura of mystery and beauty, inviting visitors to discover a past where love and courage shaped the history of a small Sicilian fief.
The Story of the Beautiful Castellan by Nicolò Speciale
But may all the faithful souls abhor and all loyal subjects fear the events that befell Delia. In that castle there were two wicked men, one named Giobbe and the other Roberto de Martorana, in whom the lord of the castle placed more trust than in any of his other servants or retainers. These men, fearing neither the dark stain of infamy nor the punishment due to wretched traitors, cast their greedy eyes upon the wife and daughter of the castellan, who acted in his Lord’s stead. Thus they slaughtered the castellan, violated his wife and daughter, and handed the castle over to the enemy.
But before the reinforcements they had requested from the Duke could arrive, one of those within the castle, unable to bear in his soul such infamous treachery, secretly summoned Berengario de Entenza, one of King Frederick’s warriors, who was then near the enemy frontier. Under cover of night, he let him into the castle through a back gate. In this way, the castle returned to the King, while the perpetrators of such wickedness, bound to the tails of horses and dragged across the ground, were punished with the supreme penalty of the gallows - a punishment due to traitors and ravishers, and one that well matched the gravity of their crimes.
Nicolò Speciale, “Historia Sicula,” Book V, Chapter XVIII, in Bibliotheca Scriptorum qui res in Sicilia gestas sub Aragonum Imperio rettulere, edited by Rosarius Gregorius, Palermo, Royal Press, 1791.