Three sisters. One bloodline. Three completely different relationships to the same inherited power. When Nico Pesce built the world of 1940: Luna Strega, he didn't give the Di Luna gift to one chosen woman and leave it at that — he split it across siblings, let it settle differently in each of them, and watched the fractures open.
The Mark and What It Means
Before the sisters can be understood, the mark has to be understood. In the Di Luna bloodline, power passes through the female line — initiated in Sicily in 1099 when Serafina Di Luna made a blood pact with the Lupa, the ancient entity sleeping inside Mount Etna. The Lupa herself descends from the union of Sariel, a Watcher angel from the apocryphal Book of Enoch, and Lilith. What Serafina received that night — and passed forward through centuries of daughters — was the crescent, burned into skin, the seat of women's power in Sicilian stregoneria.
But the crescent doesn't burn the same way twice. By the time it reaches the three sisters in mid-century America, it has already bent itself to something particular in each of them. The color of the mark tells you something. So does its absence.
Loretta: The Silver Mark
Loretta carries the silver mark, and silver in the old folk traditions is never accidental. It is the color of the moon at full strength — reflective, clear, capable of revealing what other light conceals. Among the three sisters, Loretta's power is the most visible, the most legible. She is the one the mark announced.
That visibility is its own kind of burden. To carry the silver crescent in a family where power is supposed to be hidden, passed quietly, kept away from men who would use or fear it — is to be watched. Loretta moves through the world of La Cosa Nostra families knowing that she is known. What she does with that knowledge is the engine of much of her arc in Book Two.
Joann: No Visible Mark
Joann shows no visible mark at all. In the stregoneria tradition, this would be read carefully — not as absence of the gift, but as concealment. The Cimaruta charm, one of the oldest protective amulets in Southern Italian folk magic, was worn precisely to hide power from the malocchio, the evil eye. What cannot be seen cannot be targeted.
Joann's unmarked skin makes her the sister most underestimated, and in a saga set inside the machinery of organized crime in 1940s America, underestimation is a form of armor. Her relationship to the Di Luna inheritance is more internal, more difficult to name — and that ambiguity is exactly what Pesce wanted. She sits at the center of the three sisters in ways that have little to do with birth order.
Linda: The Crimson Mark
Linda's mark is crimson. Where silver speaks of the moon, crimson speaks of blood — of sacrifice, of debt, of the price the bloodline has been paying since Serafina's pact on the slopes of Mongibello. Linda's mark is the most ancient-feeling of the three, as though the Lupa pressed her thumb directly into this particular daughter.
Crimson in Southern Italian folk magic carries associations with both protection and danger — the red thread tied against the evil eye, but also the blood of the rite. Linda's arc in Book Two is inseparable from what that color suggests. She is not the sister who hides her power or the one who wears it openly. She is the one who has been marked for something specific, and the weight of that specificity follows her through every page she appears on.
The Matriarch Behind Them: Nardina
None of the three sisters can be read in isolation from their mother. Nardina is alive throughout all of 1940: Luna Strega — she does not die until 2005, a fact that gives the entire second book a particular tension. She is not the tragic matriarch cleared from the stage to make room for her daughters. She is present, she is watching, and she has her own history with the Di Luna inheritance that the sisters are still learning to read.
Nardina is the link between the thousand-year-old Sicilian bloodline and the specific American world her daughters navigate. She carries the stregoneria traditions — the La Vigilia ritual on Christmas Eve when the gift is passed through the female line, the blood and ash work, the prayers to forces that predate the Church — and she carries them into a world that has largely stopped believing in them. Her daughters are the result of that collision.
Why Three and Not One
A single heir to an ancient power is a familiar story. Pesce made a different choice, and it matters. By distributing the Di Luna gift across three sisters — visibly, invisibly, crimson — he built a structure that asks what inheritance actually is. Is it the mark you can see? The power you can use? The debt you didn't choose but carry anyway?
The three sisters don't agree on the answers. They don't entirely agree on the questions. And their entanglement with La Cosa Nostra families in 1940s America doesn't simplify anything — it puts the old Sicilian stregoneria under pressure from a world that runs on different rules, different loyalties, different kinds of blood. The Di Luna gift was never meant to be easy. In Book Two, Pesce makes sure it isn't.
The full history of the Di Luna bloodline — how the mark was first made, what the Lupa asked for in return, and what it cost Serafina to say yes — lives in 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon. Read the beginning before Book Two pulls you into 1940. And if you want to carry something from this world with you, visit the Luna Strega store or explore more from the Luna Strega blog — there's a great deal more to say about the traditions that built this saga.