Between 1880 and 1924, more than four million Italians passed through American ports — the majority of them from the south, from Calabria and Sicily, from the towns that clung to the edge of the Mediterranean like they were afraid to let go. The men came first, usually. The women came after, and they brought the old world with them in the only way they could: carried inside them, invisible to customs inspectors, impossible to confiscate.
What the Ship Could Not Take Away
Immigration stripped Sicilian families of almost everything that gave life its texture — the dialect, the feast days, the particular smell of a village oven, the neighbors who had known your grandmother. What survived the crossing was not what was packed in trunks. It was what the women held in their bodies and their mouths: prayers in Sicilian rather than Italian, hand gestures that predated the Roman church, recipes that were never written down because writing them down would have made them ordinary.
The knowledge that traveled was not incidental. It was the architecture of daily life. How to turn one chicken into a meal for eight. How to read the way a candle burns. How to press your thumb into a child's forehead and whisper the words that push back the malocchio — the evil eye — when someone has looked at them wrong.
The Kitchen as Sacred Space
In the tenements of East Harlem, Bensonhurst, and the Hill in St. Louis, the kitchen was not a room. It was a jurisdiction. Sicilian women ruled it with an authority that had no English word — something between matriarch and priestess, though they would have laughed at either term. The Sunday gravy that simmered for six hours was not just food. It was a ritual of continuity, a weekly proof that something of the old world had survived the new one.
The recipes passed orally, daughter to daughter, measured in handfuls and intuition rather than cups and teaspoons. A woman who could cook the old dishes carried proof of lineage in her hands. To lose the recipe was to lose the connection. Many women understood this without ever putting it into words.
Folk Magic Practiced in Secret
The stregoneria — Sicilian folk magic — did not stop at Ellis Island. It went underground, practiced quietly in kitchens and back bedrooms, away from husbands who had grown embarrassed by it, away from American-born children who wanted nothing to do with the old country's superstitions. But the women who carried it did not think of it as superstition. They thought of it as competence.
The malocchio ritual — the diagnosis and breaking of the evil eye — required oil, water, and words passed from one woman to another on Christmas Eve, La Vigilia. The tradition held that the knowledge could only transfer on that night, and only through the female line. A woman who received it held something precious and specific. She was not dabbling. She was maintaining a practice that had roots older than the church that baptized her children.
The Cimaruta charm — a sprig of rue rendered in silver, hung over an infant's cradle — appeared in Sicilian-American homes through the first half of the twentieth century. Grandmothers pinned them to baby blankets while daughters-in-law looked the other way. The object itself was a compressed library of protective symbolism: the rue branch, the crescent moon, the serpent, the key. Women who wore them or made them did not always know the full history of each element. But they knew the charm worked, because their grandmothers had said so, and their grandmothers had not been wrong about things that mattered.
This living tradition — the crescent moon as a seat of women's power, the passing of the gift on La Vigilia, blood and ash as tools of ritual — sits at the center of lunastrega.com and the world Nico Pesce has built across the Di Luna bloodline saga.
Language as an Act of Resistance
Standard Italian was not the language most Sicilian immigrants spoke. They spoke Sicilian — a distinct tongue with Arabic, Norman French, Greek, and Spanish threaded through it, a linguistic record of every empire that had ever claimed the island. American schools punished children for it. The broader Italian-American community sometimes looked down on it. The pressure to abandon it was constant and came from every direction.
The women who kept it alive did so in the spaces they controlled. Prayers to particular saints. Lullabies. The words of the malocchio ritual, which could not be translated because translation would break them. Profanity, which is always the last thing a language loses. Sicilian survived in American kitchens and bedrooms for generations longer than anyone expected, carried almost entirely by women who refused — or simply did not think — to let it die.
The Feast Days and the Saints They Rewrote
Every Sicilian town had its patron, its festa, its particular way of honoring that saint that was not quite like how anyone else did it. When communities reconstituted themselves in American cities, they brought these observances with them — and the women organized them. The Society of Sant'Agata. The feast of San Gennaro. The particular procession that had to follow a particular route or it did not count.
These were not purely religious events. They were assertions. A neighborhood that could mount a proper feast was a neighborhood that still existed as itself, that had not yet been dissolved into the generic category of immigrant. The women who cooked for days beforehand, who decorated the altars, who made sure the right statue was carried by the right family — they were doing cultural preservation work without calling it that, because the work was too urgent to name.
Beneath the Catholic surface of many of these observances, older practices persisted. Votive offerings that predated Christianity. Prayers addressed to female figures whose authority the church had never fully explained. The line between the Madonna and more ancient powers of the moon and the earth was not always as clear as the priests would have preferred.
What Was Lost, and What Survived
Not everything made it. The second generation often refused the old language, embarrassed by parents who could not shed their accents. The third generation frequently did not know they had lost anything until they were grown and felt its absence without being able to name it. The folk magic thinned out as the women who held it died without passing it on — sometimes because there was no one willing to receive it, sometimes because La Vigilia came and went and the words were never spoken.
What survived did so because specific women made specific choices to carry it forward rather than set it down. Not out of nostalgia. Out of the conviction that the thing had value, that it connected the living to the dead in ways that mattered, that losing it would be a diminishment rather than a liberation.
The Di Luna women of the Luna Strega Trilogy are daughters of this history — women who carry an ancient mark, a gift passed through the female line, in a world that has never known what to do with that kind of power. The matriarch Nardina, alive through the whole of 1940: Luna Strega and into the twenty-first century, is precisely the kind of woman who does not set things down. Read where it all begins: 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon, or visit the Luna Strega store for the full series.
Find more pieces on Sicilian history, stregoneria, and the world behind the trilogy on the Luna Strega blog.