In 1940s America, La Cosa Nostra was not simply a criminal organization — it was a shadow government, a kinship structure, a set of rules older than the country it operated inside. When the Di Luna sisters step into that world in 1940: Luna Strega, they are not stepping into danger so much as stepping into a mirror of everything they already are: blood-bound, hierarchical, and answerable to powers that predate the law.
Two Worlds Built on the Same Foundation
The Mafia and the streghe share more than Sicilian soil. Both are organized around loyalty enforced by blood. Both pass their authority through family lines. Both operate in the space between the official world and the one that actually moves things. When Nico Pesce sets the Di Luna women inside the orbit of La Cosa Nostra, the collision feels less like a plot device and more like an inevitability — two systems of old-world power finally occupying the same room.
The stregoneria the Di Luna women carry traces back to Serafina's blood pact in Norman-conquered Sicily, as told in 1099: Blood of the Lupa. By the time the story reaches 1940, that pact has aged nearly a thousand years. The Mafia families the sisters encounter have their own centuries of tradition behind them. Neither side is new to consequence.
The Three Sisters and the Lines They Cross
Loretta, Joann, and Linda Di Luna are not interchangeable. The mark each carries — or does not carry — shapes how she moves through the world and how the men of La Cosa Nostra read her.
- Loretta bears the silver crescent, the mark of the Lupa's gift passed through the female line since Serafina's pact. Silver suggests something measured, something that works in the half-light.
- Joann carries no visible mark. In a world where visibility is power, invisibility is its own kind of weapon — and its own kind of vulnerability.
- Linda carries the crimson mark. Of the three, hers announces itself. In the context of Cosa Nostra, where men read every signal, that announcement carries weight.
Each sister's entanglement with the Mob reflects the nature of her mark. The trilogy is careful not to make the Mafia a simple antagonist or a simple protector. It is, like the Lupa herself, something that offers power at a price.
La Cosa Nostra as a Historical Force, Not a Backdrop
The 1940s were a specific moment for organized crime in America. The war years reshuffled alliances. Federal pressure was building. The old Mustache Petes were largely gone, and a more American — and more brutal — generation had taken their seats. Pesce sets the Di Luna story inside this particular window deliberately. The world the sisters navigate is one in transition, where the rules are being rewritten even as they are being enforced.
For Italian-American families of that era, the Mob was rarely an abstraction. It was a neighbor, a cousin's employer, a name spoken carefully at the dinner table. The Di Luna women are not outsiders who stumble into that world. They are women of Sicilian descent in mid-century America, which means La Cosa Nostra was already part of the atmosphere they breathed.
The Matriarch at the Center
Nardina Di Luna is alive for the entirety of 1940: Luna Strega. She does not die until 2005 — a fact that places her as a continuous thread across an enormous span of the family's history. While her daughters move in and out of the Cosa Nostra's gravity, Nardina represents the older authority: the line of women who carry the Lupa's mark, the keepers of the stregoneria, the ones who remember what the men with their guns and their hierarchies have forgotten.
Her presence grounds the book. When the sisters are pulled toward the Mob's world, Nardina is the counterweight — not because she is soft, but because she holds a different kind of power, one that was old before Sicily was ever a word the Normans knew.
What the Mob Can't Touch
La Cosa Nostra controls territory, money, fear. It cannot control the crescent mark burned into a Di Luna woman's skin. It cannot undo a blood pact made under Mongibello. It cannot negotiate with the Lupa. This is the fault line running beneath the entire second book — the friction between a power structure built on violence and hierarchy, and a power that was passed from mother to daughter on La Vigilia, in ritual older than the Catholic church that claimed to supersede it.
The Mafia men in 1940: Luna Strega are not fools. They sense something in the Di Luna women they cannot name. Whether they treat that sensing as an asset or a threat is where much of the book's tension lives. The stregoneria detailed throughout the series — the malocchio, the Cimaruta, the blood and ash workings, the moon as the seat of women's authority — these are not decorative. They are operational. They do things. And the Cosa Nostra, for all its reach, has no counter-ritual for what a Di Luna woman can do when the moon is right.
A Saga That Takes Both Worlds Seriously
What distinguishes the Luna Strega Trilogy from other Mafia-adjacent historical fiction is that neither world is romanticized at the expense of the other. La Cosa Nostra is portrayed with the specificity it deserves — the codes, the violence, the particular texture of Italian-American organized crime in wartime America. And the stregoneria is treated with equal precision, drawn from the living tradition of Sicilian folk magic rather than Hollywood shorthand. You can find more on how the series builds that world across the Luna Strega blog, and the craft objects and books rooted in that tradition are available through the Luna Strega store.
The Di Luna women do not choose between their heritage and their circumstances. They carry both, the way Sicilian women always have — holding the old knowledge in one hand and navigating the dangerous present with the other. That is the book's real subject. La Cosa Nostra is the pressure that reveals what the bloodline is made of.
The world of the Di Luna sisters — the crescent marks, the Mob entanglements, Nardina's long watch over her daughters, and the thousand-year inheritance that began with a blood pact in Norman Sicily — starts with 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon. The foundation has to be felt before the 1940s can hit the way they're meant to.