The Di Luna women did not leave Sicily. Sicily left them — swallowed by poverty, by the sulfur mines, by the slow strangulation of the Mezzogiorno after Unification. What they carried across the Atlantic was not luggage. It was a bloodline marked by fire, a covenant older than the Norman towers that still stood over their village, and a gift that could not be confiscated at Ellis Island.
What Norman Sicily Made of Them
The Di Luna story begins in 1099, in the generation just after the Norman conquest reshaped the island's power entirely. Robert Guiscard's heirs had taken Sicily from the Arabs, planted their castles on its ridgelines, and imposed a new Christian order over a population that still carried centuries of Arab, Byzantine, and Greek memory in its blood and in its practices.
Serafina Di Luna lived inside that fracture. She was Sicilian in the oldest sense — shaped by the island's layered occupations, not by the latest one. When she climbed toward Mongibello and made her blood pact with the Lupa, she was not turning away from her world. She was reaching beneath it, past the Normans, past the Arabs, past the Greeks, to something that had slept inside the mountain since before any of them arrived.
The mark she carried home — a crescent burned into skin — became the seal of the Di Luna bloodline. Every generation of women who followed her carried it forward. The crossing of the Atlantic, nearly eight centuries later, did not break the chain. It bent it.
The Mezzogiorno and the Great Departure
Between 1880 and 1924, roughly four million Italians emigrated to the United States. The overwhelming majority came from the south — from Calabria, Campania, and Sicily. They came because the soil had been stripped, the taxes had been raised, and the promises of Italian Unification had curdled into something that looked, to a Sicilian peasant, like a different colonization wearing a tricolor ribbon.
Sicilian women carried more than the men were credited with carrying. The men brought labor. The women brought the household — its rituals, its protections, its knowledge of which herbs hung above the door in January, which prayers were said over a sick child, which gestures deflected the malocchio before it could take hold. The stregoneria of the Sicilian kitchen was not written down anywhere an official could confiscate it. It lived in hands and mouths and memory.
The Di Luna women were heirs to a version of that tradition that ran deeper and older than most. By the time the family made the crossing, they had been carrying the Lupa's mark through crisis and survival for generations. The Atlantic was simply the latest obstacle the bloodline had to absorb.
Brooklyn and the World They Built Inside It
Italian immigrants to New York did not dissolve into the city. They reconstituted themselves — by region, by village, by dialect — in tight neighborhood clusters that maintained the social architecture of the old country inside the bones of the new one. A Sicilian street in Brooklyn in 1920 was not America in any simple sense. It was a translation, imperfect and under constant pressure, of something that refused to be left behind.
The Di Luna family landed inside that world. And inside that world, they encountered the other institution that Sicilian culture had exported intact: La Cosa Nostra. By the time the Di Luna saga reaches 1940, the family's entanglement with the mob families of mid-century America is not a betrayal of their origins. It is a consequence of them. Power in a Sicilian community had always been organized around loyalty, blood, and the threat of unseen force. The Di Lunas understood all three in ways that went beyond what any Mafia capo could fully account for.
Three Sisters, Three Marks, One Inheritance
By the events of 1940: Luna Strega, the second book in the trilogy, the Di Luna bloodline has arrived at one of its most complicated expressions. Nardina — the matriarch, who will survive into 2005 — has three daughters: Loretta, who carries the silver mark; Joann, whose mark is not visible; and Linda, whose crescent burns crimson.
The variation in the marks is not arbitrary. The Lupa's gift has never been uniform across the bloodline. It has always been calibrated — different in intensity, different in character, different in cost — depending on what each woman was made to carry. That variation is what gives the Di Luna women their complexity and their conflict. They are not copies of Serafina. They are what nine centuries of survival, migration, and inheritance have made of her original covenant.
The world they navigate in Brooklyn — the mob families, the wartime pressure, the old-world rituals practiced in American kitchens — is the meeting point of everything the Di Luna line has crossed to reach 1940. The Cimaruta charm still hangs by the door. The blood and ash ritual still marks the turning of the year. La Vigilia, Christmas Eve, is still the night when the gift passes from one woman to the next. None of that stopped at Ellis Island.
What Survived the Crossing
There is a particular kind of historical amnesia that treats immigration as erasure — as if what people carried was shed at the border, replaced cleanly by something new. The Di Luna story is a direct argument against that reading. The covenant Serafina made in Norman Sicily in 1099 is alive in a Brooklyn apartment in 1940. Not as nostalgia. Not as folklore. As an active, binding, consequential force in the lives of women who have no choice but to reckon with it.
That is what the old stregoneria actually was for the women who practiced it: not superstition, not performance, but a technology of survival, refined over generations and carried exactly because it worked. The Di Luna bloodline crossed the Atlantic because the women who bore it refused to let it die — in Sicily under the Normans, in the sulfur-choked Mezzogiorno, in the holds of the ships that brought them west, and finally in the compressed, pressurized world of the Italian-American neighborhood, where the old powers met new dangers and had to hold their own.
The mark does not care what country you are standing in. The Lupa's covenant was made before nations existed. It will outlast them too.
The story of how that bloodline travels — from Mongibello's shadow to the streets of Brooklyn, from a Norman-era blood pact to a mid-century crime family entanglement — is what Nico Pesce built across the Luna Strega Trilogy. It begins where it has to begin: in 1099, on a mountain, with a woman willing to burn. Read 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon, and follow the line forward. Or visit the Luna Strega store to explore everything the series has to offer.