Brooklyn was never just a borough. For the Sicilians and southern Italians who arrived between 1880 and 1920, it was the first real ground beneath their feet after the crossing — a place where the old world had to be rebuilt from nothing, street by street, saint's day by saint's day. What they made there lasted longer than most people realize, and the traces, if you know where to look, are still there.
The Great Arrival: How Italians Remade Brooklyn
Between 1880 and 1924, more than four million Italians entered the United States through New York. A significant portion settled not in Manhattan's Lower East Side but across the river, in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were still developing and offered cheaper tenement housing and proximity to the waterfront trades. Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Canarsie — each absorbed waves of paesani from specific regions of Italy, often from the same villages.
This is the part that gets overlooked in general histories: Italian immigration was not a single movement but dozens of small migrations layered on top of each other. Sicilians from Palermo and the western provinces clustered differently than Calabrians or Neapolitans. They reproduced the social geography of the old country in Brooklyn's street grid — the same suspicions, the same loyalties, the same campanilismo (allegiance to the bell tower of one's home village) transplanted to a borough that had no bell towers yet.
The Neighborhood as Sacred Space
What these communities built was not merely ethnic enclaves in the sociological sense. They were functional recreations of village life, complete with their own spiritual architecture. The feast of Santa Rosalia — patron saint of Palermo — was celebrated in Brooklyn with processions that wound through the streets of Bensonhurst well into the late twentieth century. The feast of San Gennaro had its Manhattan counterpart in Little Italy, but Brooklyn's Italian parishes maintained their own calendar of devotions, quieter and more neighborhood-specific.
The home was the inner sanctum of this world. Sicilian women, in particular, maintained what scholars of Italian folk religion sometimes call a domestic sacred — a sphere of protective practice that ran parallel to and sometimes in tension with official Catholic observance. Herbs, ribbons, particular saints' images, horn-shaped amulets of coral or gold — these were not decorations. They were working objects. The malocchio, the evil eye, was a real and present danger, and the women who knew how to diagnose and break it were respected figures in any block's informal hierarchy.
This lived tradition — the stregoneria that crossed the Atlantic alongside the immigrants — is the same current that runs through the Di Luna bloodline at the heart of the Luna Strega series. You can read more about how that magic operates in the real Sicilian tradition elsewhere on this blog.
Red Hook and Carroll Gardens: The Old Heart
Of all Brooklyn's Italian neighborhoods, Red Hook and Carroll Gardens held their character longest. Carroll Gardens in particular — named for its deep front gardens, an architectural quirk of its nineteenth-century rowhouses — became home to a dense Sicilian and Calabrian population that remained remarkably stable through much of the twentieth century. Social clubs with hand-lettered signs. Pastry shops that opened before dawn. Men playing cards in the afternoon light outside storefronts that sold nothing you could easily name.
Red Hook, harder against the water, had a rougher texture. It was a working waterfront neighborhood, and the labor and the commerce that came with it made it a place where different kinds of power operated in close proximity. The longshoremen's unions, the docks, the warehouses — and the men who understood that controlling the movement of goods through a port city was its own form of authority. By mid-century, La Cosa Nostra had a well-established presence in both neighborhoods, not as outsiders imposing order but as a structure that had grown from within the community itself, answering needs that official institutions either ignored or actively opposed.
Bensonhurst: The Largest Stage
If Carroll Gardens was the old heart, Bensonhurst was the full body. By the mid-twentieth century it was the largest Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn — some estimates put the Italian and Italian-American population at over eighty percent of the area at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s. Bay Ridge Avenue, 18th Avenue, the stretch of 86th Street that local residents simply called "the avenue" — these were commercial and social corridors that functioned as a kind of extended piazza.
Bensonhurst in the 1940s and 1950s is precisely the kind of world that shapes the Di Luna sisters in the Luna Strega saga. Loretta, Joann, and Linda come of age in a mid-century Italian-American world where the structures of family, church, neighborhood loyalty, and organized crime are not separate systems but a single interlocking reality. The community Nico Pesce renders in 1940: Luna Strega has the specific gravity of Bensonhurst — a place where everyone knows which family you come from and what that means.
What Remains: Brooklyn's Italian Neighborhoods Today
The demographic transformation of Brooklyn's Italian neighborhoods accelerated sharply after 1980 and became dramatic by the 2000s. Gentrification reshaped Carroll Gardens and Red Hook almost entirely. Bensonhurst shifted — Chinese and East Asian immigrants replaced Italian families as the dominant population in many blocks, a transition that happened quickly enough to feel abrupt to longtime residents. The feast processions grew smaller. The social clubs closed or dwindled to a handful of elderly members.
What remains is layered and specific rather than simply absent. There are still Italian bakeries on 18th Avenue that have been in the same family for three or four generations. There are still parishes where the old feast-day traditions persist, stripped down but not extinguished. In certain Carroll Gardens blocks, older residents can still tell you which family occupied which apartment and why that mattered. The domestic sacred — the private world of protective objects and inherited practice — is harder to measure but almost certainly persists in homes where the grandmothers are still living.
Folk traditions do not evaporate cleanly. They go underground, compress into family habit, survive in objects that outlast the people who knew what they were for. A Cimaruta charm hanging in a kitchen. A particular way of preparing a specific dish on a specific night of the year. The knowledge of which prayers are said in dialect rather than Italian, and why. These things move through bloodlines the way the Di Luna mark moves through theirs — quietly, selectively, and with more force than anyone outside the family would expect.
Why This History Still Matters
Brooklyn's Italian neighborhoods are not simply a nostalgic subject for Italian-Americans of a certain age. They are a record of how a transplanted culture managed — partly succeeded, partly failed — to carry something across an ocean and hold it together under sustained pressure. The pressure of assimilation, of economic necessity, of a dominant culture that rewarded the erasure of difference. The communities that formed in Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, and Bensonhurst were, among other things, acts of collective stubbornness.
The folk practices embedded in those communities — the stregoneria, the feasts, the protective rituals that Sicilian women maintained in their homes — were part of that stubbornness. They were a way of insisting that something old and specific was worth preserving even when the world being built around you was entirely new. The Luna Strega world takes that insistence seriously, tracing the thread of Sicilian women's power from Norman Sicily in 1099 to mid-century Brooklyn and beyond.
The Di Luna bloodline is a fiction built from something real: the women who carried the old knowledge across the water and refused to let it die in a new borough's unfamiliar streets. The history of Brooklyn's Italian neighborhoods is, among many other things, their history too.
That world — the feast days, the street-level loyalties, the dangerous proximity of family love and organized power, and the old Sicilian magic threading through it all — is the foundation of 1940: Luna Strega, Book Two of Nico Pesce's trilogy. Book One, which traces the origin of the Di Luna bloodline to its source in Norman Sicily, is available now: 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon. And if you want to go deeper into the history and folk tradition behind the series, there is more waiting at the Luna Strega blog.