The Sicilians never called it simply Etna. They called it Mongibello — a name layered from Arabic and Latin, meaning roughly "the great mountain" — and they understood it to be alive in ways that geology alone cannot explain. This was not metaphor. This was cosmology.
A Mountain That Breathes
Etna is the largest active volcano in Europe, rising more than 3,300 meters above the eastern coast of Sicily. It has erupted continuously, in some form, for more than half a million years. For the people who built their farms on its slopes, planted their vineyards in its black volcanic soil, and buried their dead in its shadow, Mongibello was not a geological feature. It was a presence. A being with moods, with hunger, with memory.
Ancient Greek colonists mapped their own mythology onto the mountain — Hephaestus hammering at his forge in the depths, the giant Typhon pinned beneath the rock, thrashing in his imprisonment and sending up smoke and fire as proof of his rage. But older beliefs lived underneath those stories, carried by the island's earlier peoples: the Sicani, the Sicels, populations who had watched Etna long before Homer gave it a name.
What survived was this: the mountain sleeps, and what sleeps inside it is not a god from an imported pantheon. It is something far older, far stranger, and far more dangerous.
Mongibello in Sicilian Folk Belief
By the medieval period, Sicilian folk tradition had developed a rich and specific understanding of Mongibello that diverged sharply from classical mythology. The mountain was understood as a threshold — a place where the world of the living pressed up against something underneath. Not hell in the Christian sense, but a deeper stratum of reality where entities of enormous power resided in a state between sleep and waking.
Sicilian folklore placed the court of the fairy queen Morgana inside Etna — a figure drawn partly from Arthurian legend (itself a northern echo of much older Celtic tradition) and partly from indigenous Sicilian beliefs about feminine supernatural power rooted in landscape. The mountain, in this telling, was a palace. A prison. A womb.
Witches in Sicilian tradition — the streghe — were understood to gather near Etna, particularly during liminal periods of the year. The mountain was not merely a backdrop. It was a source. The volcanic heat, the sulfurous vents, the black rock that cooled into strange shapes — all of this confirmed, to those who believed, that Mongibello was actively inhabited.
The Lupa and What Sleeps Below
In the mythology of the Luna Strega series, Nico Pesce draws on this deep stratum of Sicilian folk belief and extends it into something coherent and terrible. The entity sleeping inside Mongibello is the Lupa — neither the Typhon of Greek myth nor the Morgana of medieval romance, but a creature descended from the union of Sariel (one of the Watchers from the Book of Enoch, the angels who descended and commingled with the earth) and Lilith, the first exile, the figure who stands outside the created order.
That genealogy matters. The Watchers in the Enochic tradition were understood to have violated the boundary between heaven and earth, producing monstrous offspring — the Nephilim — and unleashing knowledge that humanity was not prepared to hold. Lilith, across Jewish folk tradition, represents feminine power that refused subordination, that chose exile over submission. The Lupa carries both inheritances: transgression, exile, and a power that originates outside the sanctioned world.
She sleeps inside Etna not as punishment, but as dormancy. Waiting. The volcanic fire is not her cage — it is her breath.
Blood Pacts and the Shape of the Mountain
It is 1099 in the Luna Strega narrative — Norman Sicily, a world in violent transition, where Arab, Byzantine, Norman, and older Sicilian cultures are being forced into a new configuration by conquest. Into this moment steps Serafina Di Luna, who descends into the mountain and makes a blood pact with the Lupa. What she receives in return is a mark: a crescent burned into skin, the symbol of the moon, the seat of women's power in the old Sicilian understanding.
This is drawn from something real. In Sicilian stregoneria, the moon — particularly the crescent — was understood as the source and regulator of feminine magical power. The Cimaruta, the great protective charm of southern Italian folk magic, incorporates a crescent as one of its central elements. The moon governed not just tides and planting cycles but the rhythms of the blood, the transmission of gifts through the female line, and the window of power known as La Vigilia — Christmas Eve — when the boundary between the living and the more-than-living grows thin enough to pass through.
The crescent Serafina carries becomes the inheritance of the Di Luna women across a thousand years. It appears differently in each generation — silver on Loretta, invisible on Joann, crimson on Linda in the 1940s chapters of Luna Strega — but it originates in one moment, in one mountain, in one agreement made in volcanic dark.
Why the Mountain, and Not Somewhere Else
It is worth asking why Etna specifically, and not the sea cliffs, or the ancient temples of Agrigento, or any of the other charged landscapes that cover Sicily. The answer lies in what volcanoes do to the human understanding of the earth.
A volcano makes the interior of the world visible. It proves that there is something underneath — something hot, something pressurized, something that has been accumulating force in darkness and will eventually break through. Every culture that has lived near a volcano has understood this as confirmation: the world is not a flat surface. It has depth. And what lives in that depth is not nothing.
Mongibello rises above a highly active tectonic boundary, where the African and Eurasian plates press against each other. Its eruptions have shaped the landscape, destroyed cities, buried farmland, and then — in the volcanic paradox that Sicilians have always understood — made that same land extraordinarily fertile. The mountain gives and destroys in the same gesture. That is not a neutral force. That is a personality.
For the streghe of the Sicilian tradition, and for the Di Luna women across the centuries of the Luna Strega saga, the mountain is not a symbol of power. It is the location of power. The distinction is everything.
The Mountain as Living Character
What separates genuine folk tradition from decorative mythology is this: in genuine folk tradition, the landscape participates. The mountain is not a stage. It is an actor. Sicilian folk belief never treated Mongibello as scenery. It was consulted, appeased, watched for signs, and approached with the specific mixture of reverence and wariness that one reserves for something that can end you without noticing you were there.
That tradition lives in the stregoneria that has been practiced on the island and carried by Sicilian emigrants into the diaspora — including into the Italian-American communities of the mid-twentieth century where the Di Luna sisters grow up in Book Two of the series. The old knowledge traveled. It changed shape in new soil. But the mountain remained the origin point, the anchor of the bloodline's power, the place where everything the Di Luna women carry was first agreed upon in blood and ash and fire.
The Lupa does not require belief to exist. She requires only that the bloodline hold. And the Di Luna women have held for a thousand years.
Mongibello is still active. It erupts regularly, sending ash over the Catanian plain, lighting the night sky above the Ionian Sea. The Sicilians who live on its slopes will tell you — if you ask the right way, in the right context — that the mountain is not done. That what sleeps inside it is only resting. Explore more from the Luna Strega blog for further writing on Sicilian folk magic, the history behind the series, and the traditions that shaped the Di Luna bloodline.
This is the world Nico Pesce built in 1099: Blood of the Lupa — Norman Sicily, 1099, a woman standing inside a volcano, making the agreement that will define her bloodline for a millennium. The mountain is where it begins. Get your copy and find out what Serafina brought back out of the dark.