Some books announce themselves in their first sentence. 1099: Blood of the Lupa does something slower and more deliberate — it pulls you in by degrees, until you realize the words have settled into you the way a mark settles into skin. These are the lines that stay.
On the Lupa Herself
The Lupa is not a monster conjured for atmosphere. She is ancient, specific, and patient — descended from Sariel, one of the Watchers who fell from heaven, and Lilith, who refused to be made lesser. When she speaks in the novel, her language carries that weight. She does not threaten. She offers. That distinction matters.
"I have slept inside the mountain since before your god had a name. Do not speak to me of eternity as though it were a warning."
The Lupa's voice in the novel is one of the more demanding things Nico Pesce wrote — she cannot sound like a villain, and she cannot sound like a savior. She has to sound like something older than either category.
On the Blood Pact
Serafina Di Luna does not stumble into her arrangement with the Lupa. She chooses it — with full knowledge of what it costs and what it passes on to every woman who will carry her name. The moment of the pact is not triumphant. It is clear-eyed and a little terrible.
"I give you my blood not because I am desperate. I give it because I have looked at every other door and found them locked from the outside. This one I open myself."
That line does a great deal of work. It reframes the blood pact from an act of weakness into an act of sovereignty — which is exactly what stregoneria, at its core, has always been for women who had no other kind of power. The crescent that burns into Serafina's skin after the pact is not a wound. It is a key.
On Sicily, the Land, and Mongibello
The novel is set against the backdrop of Norman-conquered Sicily in 1099 — a world of layered occupations, layered faiths, and a landscape that remembers all of it. Mount Etna, called Mongibello in the old Sicilian-Arabic tradition, is not backdrop. It is a character. Pesce writes the land as something that watches back.
"Mongibello does not erupt out of fury. It breathes. And what sleeps inside its breathing is older than the Normans, older than the Saracens, older than the Romans who named everything and understood nothing."
For readers with Sicilian roots, this framing will feel familiar even if they have never read it written down before. The mountain has always meant something specific to the people who live in its shadow.
On the Di Luna Women
The bloodline saga that begins with Serafina in 1099 and runs forward through the centuries — through Nardina, through Loretta, Joann, and Linda in mid-century America — is built on a particular understanding of inheritance. Not all gifts are gentle. Not all inheritances are chosen by the ones who receive them.
"She did not ask to be born marked. None of us asked. But here is what my mother taught me and her mother taught her: the asking was done a thousand years ago, and the answer was yes, and we are the yes."
That line appears in the context of a woman explaining the crescent mark to a daughter who is afraid of it — and it functions as a thesis for the entire trilogy. The pact Serafina made in 1099 is still reverberating in 1940, still reverberating in every generation of Di Luna women who follow.
On Stregoneria and Belief
One of the things the novel refuses to do is treat Sicilian folk magic as superstition that the characters have not yet outgrown. The Cimaruta, the malocchio, the ash and blood rituals — these are not colorful details. They are working knowledge, passed through women who understood exactly what they were doing and why.
"A charm is not a wish. It is a conversation with something that was here before you and will be here after. You bring what you have. You ask clearly. You listen for what comes back."
That is, in essence, the theology of stregoneria as it actually functions — not as performance or superstition, but as a reciprocal relationship with forces that are older than the institutions that tried to suppress them. Pesce writes that practice from the inside.
On Power Passed Through the Female Line
La Vigilia — Christmas Eve — is when the gift passes in the Di Luna line. It is not an accident that Pesce chose a date already charged with the weight of another birth, another kind of covenant. The juxtaposition is deliberate and it is never played for easy irony. The women of this bloodline take the night seriously.
"On La Vigilia, the veil does not thin. It moves aside, the way a woman moves a curtain to look at what is outside — carefully, knowing full well what the dark contains."
The quote captures something essential about the series as a whole: these women are not surprised by darkness. They are fluent in it. The mark on their skin is proof they were always going to have to be.
The lines above are only the surface of a novel dense with this kind of language — precise, grounded in real Sicilian tradition, and unwilling to make power simple or painless. This is the world Nico Pesce built in 1099: Blood of the Lupa — a thousand-year bloodline that begins with one woman, one mountain, and a pact made in darkness that the sun could not undo. Find your copy, and find the Luna Strega store for more from the world of the Di Luna women. And if these quotes brought you here for the first time, there is more from the Luna Strega blog worth reading before you go.