Sicily in 1099 was not yet a settled place. The Normans had held the island for barely a generation, and the old orders — Arab, Byzantine, ancient Greek — had not simply vanished. They had gone underground, folded into the soil, into the kitchen, into the prayers women whispered when no priest was watching.
An Island at the Crossroads of Conquest
When Roger I of Hauteville wrested Sicily from its Arab rulers between 1061 and 1072, he did not inherit a blank island. He inherited a civilization dense with competing faiths, languages, and memories. Arabic was still spoken in the markets. Byzantine mosaics still caught the light in the churches. The indigenous strata — Greek, Phoenician, older still — ran beneath everything like deep water.
By 1099, Roger I was dead and his son Simon barely ruled. The Norman grip was real but not total. Power shifted between the great noble houses. The Church consolidated wherever it could. And in the villages and masserie scattered across the interior, ordinary people continued to practice the old ways, because the old ways worked — and because no conquest had ever fully reached them.
This is the specific pressure that makes 1099 the right year. Not a moment of stability, but a fault line. Exactly the kind of fissure through which something very old might reach up and make a bargain.
What Norman Conquest Actually Meant for Sicilian Women
For the women of the island's peasant and minor noble classes, the Norman arrival changed the architecture of power without touching the roots of it. The Church gained ground. Formal inheritance law tightened. The public sphere narrowed.
What did not narrow was the transmission of knowledge between women — the herbalism, the protective charms, the rituals tied to the lunar calendar that pre-Christian Sicily had practiced for centuries. The Cimaruta, the apotropaic rue-branch charm, was already old in 1099. The malocchio — the evil eye, and the means of deflecting it — was older still. The crescent moon as seat of feminine spiritual power had roots in Sicilian soil that ran back through Arab astronomy, through Greek Selene, through something that predated even those names.
Serafina Di Luna moves through this world. She is not an anomaly in it. She is its sharpest expression.
The Lupa: What Lives Inside Mongibello
Mount Etna — Mongibello in the old Sicilian tongue, the mountain of mountains — has never stopped being sacred. Every culture that has touched Sicily has had to reckon with it. It erupts. It reshapes coastlines. It burns and then gives back extraordinary fertility to the soil. No purely geological explanation has ever fully satisfied the people who live in its shadow.
The Lupa who sleeps inside Mongibello in Blood of the Lupa is drawn from a specific theological lineage: the Watchers of the Book of Enoch, the angels who descended and bound themselves to the material world, and from Lilith, the first refusal, the figure who chose exile over submission. Their union produced something that is neither angel nor demon in the conventional sense — something that has its own ancient contract with the land.
When Serafina makes her blood pact and receives the crescent mark burned into her skin, she is not simply acquiring power. She is entering a covenant with an entity that has been waiting inside that volcano through every wave of conquest the island has ever endured. The Normans do not know this. The Church does not know this. The Di Luna bloodline will carry this knowledge forward for a thousand years.
Why Historical Accuracy Matters to This Story
The folk magic in the Luna Strega Trilogy is drawn from documented Sicilian stregoneria: real charms, real ritual structures, real beliefs about the transmission of power through the female line. The La Vigilia ceremony — Christmas Eve, the longest night, the moment when the gift passes from mother to daughter — reflects genuine folk observance reshaped by the story's internal logic.
Getting 1099 right matters because the magic has to be believable inside its historical container. If the Norman world feels approximate, the pact feels approximate. The specificity of the setting — the particular instability of Sicily under early Norman rule, the survival of Arab and Byzantine cultural traces, the very real danger of being a woman with knowledge — is what gives the supernatural elements their weight.
From my perspective as the author, I kept returning to one question during the research: what would it cost a woman to hold this kind of power in this particular moment? The answer is what drives Serafina's choices in Book One.
The Thread That Runs Forward
The mark Serafina receives in 1099 is the same mark that Loretta carries as a silver crescent and Linda carries as a crimson one in 1940: Luna Strega. Eight hundred and forty years separate those women, and yet the covenant is unbroken. The Di Luna bloodline moves through Norman Sicily, through the centuries of Spanish and Bourbon rule, through the great emigration, into the kitchens and complications of mid-century America — and the Lupa's mark comes with it.
That continuity only works if the origin point is solid. 1099 has to hold the weight of everything that follows. A different era, a less fractured moment, would not have produced the same story. The fault line matters. The bargain could only have been made in a place where the old orders were cracking and the new ones had not yet sealed.
You can find more about the world of the trilogy and the Sicilian folk traditions that run through it on the Luna Strega blog, or explore the full series at lunastrega.com.
The world described above — the volcano, the covenant, the crescent burned into skin in a Sicily that was already ancient when the Normans arrived — is where this entire bloodline saga begins. 1099: Blood of the Lupa is available now. The Di Luna women have been waiting a long time.