There is a book that begins with blood on a mountain and ends with a bloodline changed forever. 1099: Blood of the Lupa is the first volume of the Luna Strega Trilogy — a dark historical saga rooted in authentic Sicilian folk magic, written by Nico Pesce. If you have never heard of it, this is where you start.
The Year, the Place, the Wound
The novel opens in Norman-conquered Sicily, in the year 1099. The island has passed through Arab, Byzantine, and now Norman hands, and the old ways — the whispered prayers, the protective charms, the magic that belongs to women and mountains and blood — are being pressed to the margins by a new Christian order.
Into this world steps Serafina Di Luna, the woman whose choice will define her family for a thousand years. She does not seek power carelessly. She seeks it the way desperate people seek anything — because the alternative is worse. What she finds on the slopes of Mount Etna, known in the old tongue as Mongibello, is not a gift. It is a pact.
The Lupa: What She Is and Where She Sleeps
The entity at the center of the novel is the Lupa — ancient, sleeping inside the volcano, neither fully angelic nor demonic by any tidy theological measure. Her lineage, as the mythology of the trilogy constructs it, descends from the union of Sariel — a Watcher angel named in the Book of Enoch — and Lilith. She is not a metaphor. In the world of this book, she is real, and she is waiting.
The blood pact Serafina strikes with the Lupa leaves a mark: a crescent burned into skin. That crescent is not decorative. It is the seat of power in the Di Luna female line, passed from mother to daughter, changing in form and color as the centuries turn. What begins in Sicily in 1099 will still be burning — literally — in mid-century America, when the trilogy continues in Book Two.
The Magic Is Real — or Was
Nico Pesce built the magical system in Blood of the Lupa from the documented practices of Sicilian stregoneria: folk magic that was never entirely eradicated by the Church, that survived in households and in the hands of women who knew which words to say over a candle and which herbs to burn at a threshold.
Readers will find the malocchio — the evil eye — treated here not as superstition but as a living force with rules and consequences. The Cimaruta charm, a layered silver amulet specific to southern Italian tradition, appears in the logic of the series. Blood and ash rituals, the particular power of La Vigilia (Christmas Eve) as a moment when gifts can be passed through the female line — all of it is drawn from the historical and ethnographic record of Sicilian practice.
This is not a novel that uses folk magic as atmosphere. It uses folk magic as architecture.
What Kind of Reader Is This For
If you read historical fiction and want it to feel genuinely rooted in place and period — in the political chaos of Norman Sicily, in the texture of peasant spiritual life — this book was written for you. If you are drawn to dark fantasy that earns its darkness, where the supernatural costs something and the magic is never free, this is that kind of story.
Italian-American readers, in particular, may find something here that feels less like discovery and more like recognition. The traditions woven through the Di Luna saga — the matriarchal knowledge, the protective rituals, the old suspicion that the Church did not replace the older powers but simply built over them — are not invented from nothing. They are assembled from what was actually practiced and actually believed across centuries of Sicilian life.
You can explore more of the history and lore behind the series on the Luna Strega blog, where these traditions are examined in depth.
The Scope of the Trilogy
1099: Blood of the Lupa is the origin — the wound that opens everything. But the Luna Strega Trilogy spans a thousand years of the Di Luna bloodline. Book Two, 1940: Luna Strega, follows the matriarch Nardina and her three daughters — Loretta, Joann, and Linda — as they come of age in mid-century America, each carrying the mark differently: one silver, one invisible, one crimson. Their world is entangled with La Cosa Nostra, with immigration and assimilation, with the question of what happens to old power when it is transplanted to new soil.
The crescent mark that Serafina carries out of Sicily in 1099 is still burning in 1940. That continuity — the way a single act of desperation echoes forward through generations — is the structural spine of the entire trilogy.
A Note on the Author's Approach
Nico Pesce has described the Luna Strega Trilogy as a project of recovery as much as invention — recovering the folk traditions of southern Italy and Sicily that were often dismissed, even within Italian-American families, as embarrassing remnants of the old country. The magic in these books is treated with the same seriousness as the history. Neither is decoration.
That commitment shows in the specificity of the detail: a particular mountain, a particular angel, a particular feast day, a particular charm. Readers who know the traditions will find them handled with respect. Readers encountering them for the first time will find them rendered with enough clarity that nothing requires a footnote to land with full force.
The Di Luna women are not relics. They are the people your grandmothers may have half-remembered, the ones who knew which prayers were older than the Church. 1099: Blood of the Lupa is the story of where that knowing began — and what it cost. Get your copy of 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon, or visit the Luna Strega store to see everything the series has to offer.