The Leggenda di Messer Gianni di Procida ("Legend of Mister John of Procida") is a short medieval Tuscan history of the Sicilian Vespers, synoptic with another early Tuscan account, the Liber Jani de Procida et Palialoco. Both texts focus on the conspiratorial role played by John of Procida, who is cast as a villain. A contemporaneous Sicilian writing, Lu rebellamentu di Sichilia, portrays John as a hero. Both Tuscan versions are later than the Sicilian, but may share the Reballamentu as a source. Conversely, all three may derive from an earlier, now lost source. All three agree on the centrality of John of Procida in the Vespers.Deno John Geanakoplos (1959), Emperor Michael Palaeologus and the West, 1258–1282: A Study in Byzantine–Latin Relations (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 351.
The Leggenda was probably written by a Guelph of Modena.Steven Runciman (1958), The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), 290.Marta VanLandingham (2002), Transforming the State: King, Court and Political Culture in the Realms of Aragon (1213–1387) (BRILL, ), 47. Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè first suggested that the Leggenda may have influenced the Florentine Nuova Cronica of Giovanni Villani, but a critical study by German historian Otto Hartwig soon dismissed this.Otto Hartwig (1871), "Giovanni Villani und die Leggenda di Messer Gianni di Procida," Historische Zeitschrift, 23, 233–71. The Leggenda is conserved in a Modenese manuscript.Vincenzo di Giovanni (1871), Filologia e letteratura siciliana: studii (Palermo: L. P. Lauriel), 52, who quotes its prologue. It was published by Lodovico Antonio Muratori in his Raccolta degli storici Italiani, XXXIV.
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