The question comes up often, and it deserves a real answer rather than a polished non-answer. Yes — the Luna Strega Trilogy is rooted in living Sicilian folk tradition, in the kind of magic that was practiced quietly in kitchens and passed between women who never called themselves witches because they didn't need to.
What "Based On" Actually Means Here
It does not mean that Nico Pesce found a Di Luna family in an archive and transcribed their history. What it means is more interesting than that. The ritual logic of the books — the way power moves through bloodlines, the specific role of the crescent moon, the mechanics of the evil eye and its remedies — all of that is drawn from stregoneria, the Sicilian folk magic tradition that predates the Norman conquest and never fully disappeared, even when it had to go underground to survive.
The world of the trilogy did not have to be invented from scratch. It had to be excavated.
The Cimaruta, the Malocchio, and the Grammar of the Old Ways
Two of the most important elements in the books — the Cimaruta charm and the malocchio — are not fictional inventions. The Cimaruta, a sprig of rue cast in silver and hung with small charms representing protection and fertility, was carried by Sicilian and Neapolitan women for centuries. It was a charm against the evil eye, yes, but also a declaration of allegiance to an older order of protection than the Church could offer.
The malocchio — the evil eye — is one of the most persistent and widely documented forms of folk belief in the Mediterranean world. In Sicily it was not metaphor. A look could wound. Envy could sicken a child. The remedies were precise: olive oil dropped into water, specific prayers spoken in dialect, the identity of the one who cast the eye sometimes burned out of the ritual itself. The women who knew these remedies held a particular kind of authority in their communities, whether anyone acknowledged it openly or not.
The Di Luna women in the trilogy inherit this grammar. Their power does not arrive as something alien — it arrives as something that was always already there, waiting to be recognized.
Mount Etna, the Lupa, and Deep Mythological Time
The figure at the center of Book One is the Lupa — an ancient entity who sleeps inside Mongibello, the Sicilian name for Mount Etna. She is descended from the union of Sariel, a Watcher angel from the Book of Enoch, and Lilith. When Serafina Di Luna makes a blood pact with the Lupa in 1099 — the year of the Norman conquest — she is not simply acquiring a supernatural ability. She is binding her bloodline to something that existed long before Sicily had a name.
This layering is deliberate and historically grounded. Sicily has been occupied, converted, and renamed by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and eventually unified Italy. Folk belief survived all of it by absorbing pieces of each incoming culture while protecting a harder interior core. The idea that something ancient sleeps inside Etna — that the mountain is not merely geological but alive in some older sense — is consistent with how Sicilians have talked about that volcano for a very long time. The Lupa is Nico Pesce's specific creation, but she emerges from real mythological soil.
La Vigilia and the Passing of the Gift
In the trilogy, power passes between Di Luna women on La Vigilia — Christmas Eve — the threshold night that in Southern Italian tradition carries enormous spiritual weight. The Feast of the Seven Fishes, the vigil before the birth, the hours when the boundary between the living and the dead was understood to be thinnest: this is not invented atmosphere. La Vigilia was the night when the old things could move.
Choosing this moment for the transmission of the bloodline's gift is one of the ways the books do something more careful than most supernatural fiction. The magic is not arbitrary. It obeys the calendar, the seasons, the logic of the tradition it comes from. When Loretta, Joann, and Linda — the three sisters at the center of Book Two — navigate their inheritance in mid-century America, the roots of that inheritance reach back through their grandmother Nardina, through Serafina, through 1099 and the pact itself. The crescent mark burned into skin is not a fantasy device. It is a bloodline memory.
The Matriarch Who Holds It Together
One detail that grounds the saga in the reality of how these traditions actually functioned: Nardina, the matriarch, does not die young and does not die offstage. She is alive throughout Book Two, present and formidable well into the 1940s and beyond — she does not die until 2005. In real stregoneria, the elder woman who holds the knowledge is not a figure from the distant past. She is in the room. She is watching how you handle things. Her longevity in the trilogy is not a narrative convenience. It reflects the way this kind of authority actually persisted — through presence, through memory, through a woman who outlasted everything that tried to erase what she knew.
What Fiction Gives That the Archive Cannot
Folklore scholars can document the Cimaruta. Ethnographers can record versions of the oil-and-water ritual. But the inner life of a woman who carries the malocchio and the crescent mark both — who is feared by the men around her and depended on by the women, who navigates the Mob world of 1940s America without ever forgetting what she is — that requires fiction to reach.
The Luna Strega Trilogy is not a documentary. It is something more faithful than that: a story that takes the tradition seriously enough to ask what it actually felt like to live inside it, across a thousand years, in bodies marked by a pact made before the Normans came ashore.
The stregoneria described above lives at the heart of the Di Luna bloodline — from Serafina's blood pact at the foot of Mongibello to the three sisters trying to survive mid-century America with a mark they didn't ask for and can't put down. Read where it begins: 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon. And if you want to explore more of the world behind the books, visit lunastrega.com or browse more from the Luna Strega blog.