The Di Luna women do not choose their power. It chooses them — burned into skin, passed through blood, stretching back to a single night in Norman-conquered Sicily when a woman named Serafina made a pact she could never unmake. What follows is a thousand years of daughters carrying something ancient and dangerous inside them, across continents, across centuries, into the American mid-century and beyond.
Where It Begins: Sicily, 1099
The Norman conquest of Sicily is the historical hinge on which the entire saga turns. By the close of the eleventh century, the island had passed through Arab and Byzantine hands before Roger I secured it for the Normans — a crossroads culture, dense with competing faiths and older, stranger things underneath all of them.
It is in this fractured world that Serafina Di Luna enters into her blood pact with the Lupa. The Lupa is no simple witch's familiar or folk spirit. She is an entity of genuine antiquity — born of the union between Sariel, one of the Watchers described in the Book of Enoch, and Lilith. She sleeps inside Mongibello, the mountain Sicilians have always known as a living thing, what the rest of the world calls Mount Etna.
The pact leaves a mark: a crescent burned into Serafina's skin. That crescent is not merely a symbol. It is the seat of the gift itself — the channel through which the Lupa's power moves into mortal women. And it does not stop with Serafina.
The Crescent Mark and the Logic of Inheritance
In the stregoneria tradition, power moves through the female line. It is not taught so much as transferred — a living current passed from mother to daughter under specific conditions. In the Di Luna bloodline, that transfer happens on La Vigilia, Christmas Eve, the night the old magic considers the veil between worlds at its thinnest.
But the crescent mark does not appear the same way twice. Across the Di Luna generations, daughters are born with variations: the mark may be silver, crimson, or absent entirely from the visible skin. By the time the saga reaches the 1940s, those variations carry real consequence for the three sisters at the center of the trilogy's second book.
Loretta carries a silver mark. Linda's is crimson. Joann shows no visible mark at all — which does not mean she is untouched. It means something different is happening with her inheritance, something the women around her may not fully understand yet. In a bloodline this old, absence is never the same as nothing.
A Thousand Years Is Not a Metaphor
The trilogy spans from 1099 to 2005. That is not an arbitrary range. It is the full arc of what a single supernatural pact does to a family across real historical time — the Crusades, the centuries of Sicilian occupation and emigration, the mass migration to America, the rise of La Cosa Nostra, and the long twentieth century.
Book One plants the root. Book Two — 1940: Luna Strega — shows the bloodline in its most complicated American form, with three sisters coming of age during a specific and well-documented moment: Italian-American families navigating identity, loyalty, and organized crime in the mid-century United States. The matriarch Nardina is alive throughout Book Two, a thread of continuity connecting the old world to the new.
The Lupa does not disappear from the story just because the Di Luna women have crossed an ocean. Distance does not dissolve a blood pact. It may, however, change what the pact costs.
The Folk Magic Underneath the Fiction
Nico Pesce built the Di Luna saga on the actual practices of Sicilian stregoneria — not a romanticized version of it, but the specific material tradition: the Cimaruta charm with its rue-branch and its small hanging symbols; the malocchio, the evil eye, which in Sicilian folk belief is neither metaphor nor mere bad luck but an active force that must be drawn out through ritual; blood and ash as agents of binding; the crescent moon as the source of women's particular authority in the magical tradition.
These are not invented decorations on the story. They are the architecture. When a Di Luna woman performs a working in these pages, she is performing something that would have been recognizable to a Sicilian village healer in the seventeenth century. That continuity is the point. The Lupa is ancient because the tradition she represents is ancient.
What the Bloodline Asks of Its Women
A pact of this kind is not a gift without terms. The Di Luna women across the centuries are not uniformly powerful, uniformly willing, or uniformly aware of what they carry. Some embrace it. Some deny it. Some pass it on with full ceremony; others pass it on in chaos, in grief, in the middle of circumstances that leave no room for ritual.
What the saga is really tracing, beneath the historical detail and the dark atmosphere, is what it means to inherit something you did not ask for — and what you do with it anyway. The crescent mark does not ask permission. The Lupa does not explain herself. The Di Luna women must make sense of it generation by generation, with whatever knowledge and whatever world they happen to have been born into.
That is the question the trilogy asks across a thousand years. Not can you survive the gift, but what do you become in the living of it.
Reading the Saga in Order
The bloodline makes the most sense when you start at the root. 1099: Blood of the Lupa is the necessary foundation — Serafina's pact, the nature of the Lupa, the first crescent mark, and the world of Norman Sicily that shapes everything that follows. Without it, the twentieth-century Di Luna sisters are compelling but unmoored.
Book Two, 1940: Luna Strega, assumes you know what the mark means, what La Vigilia costs, why the absence of a visible crescent is not the same as safety. It builds on the foundation rather than re-explaining it, which means it can go further, darker, and deeper into what the bloodline does to a family over time.
If you want the full weight of what the Di Luna women carry, you begin in Sicily, in the shadow of Mongibello, in 1099. Everything else in this saga — every crescent mark, every Christmas Eve ritual, every daughter born into something she did not choose — flows from that single night. You can find more on the lore, the history, and the magic across the Luna Strega blog, and see everything available from the series at the Luna Strega store.
The Di Luna bloodline is a thousand-year story about power, inheritance, and the price of a pact made in blood. It begins with one woman and one mark and one sleeping entity inside a Sicilian volcano. Get your copy of 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon and start where the Di Luna women started — at the origin, in the dark, with everything still ahead of them.