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?

Her great-grandmother led her existence exposed to the weather ("under the sun and the rain"[citation needed]) in front of the Porta Judaeorum of Messina, where she sold food from a stall in the open.

In the early 13th century, during the Swabian period, he was a servant or soldier employed by the custodian of the state palace of Scaletta, a stronghold built to control traffic on the road that led to Messina from the south, coming from Catania and Syracuse.

Thus it was that without fail that Giovanni opened up horizons and new opportunities, including the royal road of a highly placed marriage, sealed with a Sicilian noblewoman of the house of Cottone.

After the success of the Ghibelline Vespers revolt, though being aligned with the victors, "Macalda represents the Sicilian nobles of Guelph tradition who had been prominent in the Communitas Siciliae [it], that ephemeral political experiment of island autonomy that had preceded the arrival of the Aragonese.

However, there are those who believe that this alone is not enough to justify the chronicler's rancor; his narration on Macalda became "particularly poisonous, to the point of warranting suspicion that the austere and learned Messinese historian had been a victim of the woman's spell."

In chapter 96 of his Llibre del Rei en Pere, he describes her as "very beautiful and genteel, talented in her heart and her body, generous in giving and, at the right time and place, valorous in the use of arms on par with a knight."

It has been delicately noted that Desclot in this passage had lightly corrected his draft with respect to the even more flattering tone used in a previous version of his chronicle, making a subtle sort of self-censoring for the sake of propaganda: in an early draft, indeed, Macalda was described as leyal (loyal); then, after the woman had fallen into ruin for her presumed conspiracy, this attribute was evidently no longer usable in a neutral way, so it was replaced by "beautiful."

Macalda had no remorse: without regrets she abandoned her husband dying in the Templars' Hospital, and began wandering for some time, wearing the habit of a friar minor, sojourning in various provinces between Messina and Naples, and exhibiting behavior that was not impeccable.

On that occasion, Macalda made herself the leading figure in Catania by an unscrupulous betrayal of the French who had rebelled against her in the clamor of the Vespers: after having feigned a gracious welcome, she stripped them of their property instead, and then left them to the mercy of the enraged people.

Indeed, at that time, once she learned of the Aragonese arriving in Randazzo, Macalda presented herself to them in great pomp, adorned with superb military attire, holding a silver mace in her hand, animated by intentions of sexual lust that were soon made explicit.

It was the Messinese Vitale del Giudice (Vitalis de Judice), formerly a friend and crony of Manfred, then reduced to a state of begging because of the consistent fealty he had cultivated for the Swabian dynasty.

The old man warned the king of the volatility of political alliances in Sicily and, in particular, of the inconstancy of Alaimo, who had already betrayed Manfred and Charles of Anjou, but made even worse by conditioning and intrigues that, according to the white-haired beggar, he was subjected to by Macalda and by her wicked father, Giacomo Scaletta.

At Santa Lucia del Mela, Macalda asked for hospitality from the king, who was quartered in the local castle, giving as a reason the lack of inns in that small village, since she had been the last to get there.

But in front of the insolence of Macalda, who remained glued to her chair, he decided to get free of the embarrassment by calling the proprietors and their family members into the room and entertaining himself with that audience in various conversations and digressions, among which he made a show of his proven marital fidelity.

But the defeat inflicted on her by Peter of Aragon's ostentatious marital fidelity gravely wounded her feminine pride, inciting Macalda to vindictive behavior, with acts of jealousy and emulation toward the court and particularly toward Queen Constance.

Macalda began to defy her openly, acting like a royal highness, and made a show of snubbing and degrading going so far as refusing to call her "queen," and limiting her, in her haughtiness, to the reductive title "mother of James."

Thus Macalda inaugurated a season of mad and extravagant rivalries with the royal highnesses, which led her to refuse the queen's benevolence; she carefully avoided attending her, though not at the opportunities to vaunt a particular hairdo or to show off some special dress woven with imperial purple.

Macalda did not miss the chance to emulate her: in perfect health and for no other reason, she paraded through the streets of Palermo on a luxurious litter festooned with scarlet cloth, held up on the unruly shoulders of some of her husband's soldiers and peasants from her country.

Macalda, as was her custom, quickly stepped in to accompany him, but she wanted to do it with her usual arrogance, acting "as much a justiciar as her husband," escorted by a cortege comparable in splendor but immensely greater in numbers, and of a rather dubious appearance: the entourage she had with her numbered "three hundred sixty men at arms, of doubtful faith or suspicious, deliberately gleaned from various lands," a large company of brigands, a band of disorderly troops, more than a cortege of knights.

Without yet seeing fulfilled the proper claim to defend himself in a regular process, together with his nephews (including Adenolfo da Mineo), he was put on the ship that was ostensibly going to take him back to Sicily.

But, unknown to him, his fate had already been sealed before leaving: when the journey reached its end near Marettimo, he and his nephews were led unawares onto the bridge of the ship, by which time Sicily was already on the horizon.

The precise awareness of this unforeseen metamorphosis can be gathered from the disconsolate Macalda's bitter words from the prison on the turn of events, addressing Roger of Lauria, the Aragonese admiral, brilliant for his military command but known for extreme avidity and for a cruelty that appeared unusual even for that time.

From the time of her imprisonment, after the information on her proud address to Roger of Lauria and her entertainments in the prison of Matagrifone, practically every trace of Macalda is missing from the chronicles of the day, a silence that has warranted historians' presumption of her death a few years later.

Still, there exists an archival document that records her as still living there on December 3, 1307, when Macalda Scaletta, probably facing financial difficulties deriving from her second widowhood, signed a contract by which she rented to a certain Mastro Pagano Barberio, for a term of 22 years, the service and work (servitia et operas) of Anna, one of her servants of Greek origin (ancillam de Romania).

), a minor but successful artist in the panorama of nineteenth-century Italian music, who also composed the opera Alaimo da Lentini, produced at the Fraschini Theater of Pavia in 1885.

Fiorentini's book is a collection of literary portraits of femmes fatales, from the mysterious and dissolute lives, famous lovers, and concubines of rulers and men of power.