In the Luna Strega Trilogy, La Cosa Nostra is not backdrop. It is architecture — the framework through which the Di Luna women move, negotiate, and survive mid-century America. When the three sisters of 1940: Luna Strega come of age, the mob is not a distant rumor. It is the neighborhood itself.
Sicily Carried Both Things Across the Water
The same island that produced the streghe also produced the families. This is not coincidence. Both stregoneria and Cosa Nostra emerged from the same soil: a Sicily that had been conquered repeatedly — by Normans, Aragonese, Bourbons — and learned to survive by keeping its real power hidden from official eyes. The cunning woman and the man of respect operated by the same principle. What the state cannot see, it cannot control.
When Sicilian immigrants arrived in America's northeastern cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they brought both inheritances with them. The folk magic traditions — the malocchio, the Cimaruta charm, the blood and ash rituals passed through the female line — traveled in the same baggage as the codes of omertà and the logic of the clan. In the Luna Strega universe, these two currents run parallel for generations before they intersect in the lives of Loretta, Joann, and Linda Di Luna.
The Families in Book Two
By 1940, the Italian-American underworld had already passed through its most violent reorganization. The Castellammarese War of 1930–1931 ended with the rise of the Commission — a governing structure that distributed territory and arbitrated disputes among the major families. The men who ran those families were, in many cases, themselves Sicilian-born or the sons of Sicilian immigrants. They understood, at least culturally, what a woman from a certain kind of family might carry.
The Di Luna sisters move within the orbit of these men — not as passive figures, but as women whose bloodline mark signals something those men cannot fully name and cannot entirely dismiss. Loretta carries the silver crescent. Linda carries the crimson. The power that Serafina Di Luna sealed with a blood pact beneath Mongibello in 1099 has moved through nine centuries of female inheritance, and it does not become less dangerous because it is now sitting at a table in New Jersey.
The matriarch Nardina is very much alive through the events of Book Two — and her presence is a stabilizing force the families would do well not to underestimate. She does not die until 2005. She has watched men like these come and go.
Power Structures and the Women Who Navigate Them
Cosa Nostra in mid-century America was emphatically a male institution. Women were expected to occupy specific, circumscribed roles — wives, mothers, figures of domestic sanctity held apart from the work of the street. The real history of Italian-American organized crime shows this clearly. Women knew things. Women sometimes ran things in the shadows. But the formal structure excluded them by design.
This tension is load-bearing in 1940: Luna Strega. The Di Luna women possess a form of power that operates entirely outside the organizational chart of the mob. It answers to older laws — the laws of the Lupa, the ancient entity who sleeps inside Etna, descended from the union of Sariel (one of the Watcher angels of the Book of Enoch) and Lilith. No consigliere has jurisdiction over that. No underboss can revoke the mark burned into a Di Luna woman's skin on La Vigilia.
What makes the sisters' situation genuinely dangerous is that they exist at the intersection of two hierarchies — one visible and armed, one ancient and blood-sealed — and belonging fully to neither.
The Mob as Historical Texture, Not Decoration
Nico Pesce's approach to Cosa Nostra in the trilogy is grounded in the actual documented history of Italian-American organized crime in the 1940s. The geography is real. The structure of the families — capo, underboss, soldier, associate — reflects how those organizations actually functioned. The social world the sisters inhabit, the feast days and the social clubs and the particular silence that falls in certain rooms, draws from the documented texture of Italian-American urban life in that era.
Folk magic receives the same treatment. The stregoneria in these pages is not invented atmosphere. The Cimaruta, the use of blood and ash in ritual, the crescent moon as the seat of women's power, the passing of the gift through the female line on Christmas Eve — these are drawn from the living tradition of Sicilian folk practice. When the two systems collide in the narrative, the collision has weight because both sides are real.
For readers interested in exploring the folk magic tradition that runs through the entire trilogy, there is more to read on the Luna Strega blog, and the Luna Strega store carries items that reflect these same traditions.
What the Families Cannot Buy or Threaten
The central tension the mob storyline creates for the Di Luna women is not simply physical danger, though that is real enough. It is the question of loyalty and obligation. Cosa Nostra runs on debt — on favors given and owed, on bonds sealed in specific ways, on the understanding that no one operates freely. The Di Luna bloodline also runs on obligation — on the terms of a pact made in Norman Sicily, on the price of the power the Lupa gave Serafina in 1099.
A woman who carries the crescent mark is already bound. What happens when a second set of obligations is placed on top of the first? What happens when the men holding those obligations do not know what they are actually dealing with?
This is the question 1940: Luna Strega is built around. The mob families are formidable. They have money, soldiers, political protection, and institutional memory going back decades. None of that prepared them for the Di Luna women, and none of it prepared them for what the Di Luna women carry.
A Thousand Years Running Underneath One Story
The Luna Strega Trilogy is, at its core, a saga about what survives. The Di Luna bloodline has moved through Norman conquest, the Inquisition, and the long Atlantic crossing. By 1940, it has arrived in America carrying everything — the mark, the magic, and the accumulated weight of nine centuries of women who made hard choices under harder conditions. La Cosa Nostra is the latest set of walls the bloodline has to move through. It will not be the last.
The stregoneria is older than the families. The Lupa is older than Sicily. And Nardina Di Luna, very much alive and watching, has a longer view than anyone sitting across the table from her daughters.
The world the Di Luna bloodline was born into — the blood pact, the mark, the entity sleeping inside Mongibello — is where this saga begins. 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon is Book One: Norman-conquered Sicily, Serafina Di Luna, and the night the pact was made. Everything in 1940 flows from that. Start there, and the weight of what the sisters carry will make complete sense. You can also visit lunastrega.com to follow the full scope of the trilogy.