The phrase luna strega translates, roughly, as "moon witch" — but that translation flattens something older and stranger than the English words suggest. In Sicilian folk tradition, the moon was never merely a light in the sky. It was the seat of women's power, the regulator of blood, the force that pulled tides and tipped the scales between the visible world and the one just beneath it.
The Name Carries the Tradition
Sicilian stregoneria — the island's living current of folk magic — has always centered the moon as feminine authority. The strega (witch, wise woman, healer, depending on who was asking and what they feared) drew her power from lunar cycles in ways that were practical and embodied, not symbolic. She timed her workings to the waxing and waning. She read omens in the moon's color. She understood that the crescent, specifically, was a blade as much as a vessel — a shape that could cut as cleanly as it could hold.
A luna strega, then, is not simply a woman who practices magic under the moon. She is a woman through whom the moon's power moves as inheritance — passed down through blood, confirmed through ritual, and marked on the body itself.
The Mark: A Crescent Burned into Skin
In the Di Luna bloodline at the heart of this trilogy, the mark is literal. A crescent burned into the skin — not tattooed, not drawn, but burned — appears on the women who carry the gift forward. It is not decorative. It is confirmation.
The mark originates with Serafina Di Luna in 1099, when she makes a blood pact with an entity called the Lupa — an ancient, sleeping power inside Mount Etna, descended from the union of Sariel (one of the Watcher angels of the Book of Enoch) and Lilith. What Serafina receives in that pact, she passes to every daughter who follows. The crescent is the Lupa's signature on the bloodline, and it does not always appear the same way. By the time the story reaches three Di Luna sisters in 1940s America, the mark has differentiated: Loretta carries a silver crescent, Linda's burns crimson, and Joann shows no visible mark at all — which is its own kind of information, if you know how to read it.
In authentic Sicilian tradition, markings, discolorations, and unusual birthmarks were understood as signs of election — indications that a child had been chosen or touched by forces operating outside ordinary inheritance. The Di Luna crescent belongs to that same interpretive world.
The Power: What the Bloodline Actually Does
The power carried by the Di Luna women is not a catalog of spells. It operates through the body — through blood, through perception, through the kind of knowing that arrives before the mind has words for it. It is, in this way, consistent with how Sicilian stregoneria has always been described by practitioners and ethnographers alike: less a system of commands issued to the supernatural, and more a relationship of attunement with forces that were already present.
The specific gifts vary by woman and by mark. But the underlying current is the same: the Lupa's nature flows through the female line, and it carries something of both its parents — Sariel's angelic capacity for revelation and transgression, Lilith's refusal of submission and her intimate knowledge of the spaces men do not control. Together, these produce women who see clearly, who move through danger with an edge that looks like luck but is something more deliberate, and who understand — viscerally — what is owed and what can never be repaid.
The Bloodline: A Thousand Years, One Pact
The Luna Strega Trilogy follows this inheritance across nearly a millennium. 1099: Blood of the Lupa begins the story at the moment of origin: Norman-conquered Sicily, the shadow of Mongibello, and Serafina's choice to bind her descendants to something that cannot be unbound. Every Di Luna woman who comes after her carries that choice forward — whether she knows its full weight or not.
By Book Two, 1940: Luna Strega, the bloodline has crossed an ocean and landed in mid-century America, where Nardina Di Luna holds the family together and her three daughters navigate a world of organized crime, inherited power, and the old rituals that refuse to dissolve just because the address has changed. Nardina, it should be noted, survives well into the new century — she does not die until 2005 — which means the trilogy spans not just centuries of history but the full arc of one woman's extraordinary life.
The passing of the gift follows strict tradition: it happens on La Vigilia, Christmas Eve, in a ritual that echoes the blood and ash ceremonies documented in Sicilian folk practice. The timing is not incidental. The Vigilia sits at the threshold of the year's longest night, a moment when the boundary between what is seen and unseen grows thin enough to pass things through.
The Lupa: Not a Goddess, Not a Demon
It would be easy to categorize the Lupa — to file her under one of the familiar headings. The trilogy resists that. She is ancient in the way that geological formations are ancient: not old in human time but old in a way that makes human categories feel provisional. She sleeps inside Etna, which the Sicilians have always called Mongibello — "the mountain of mountains" — a volcano that has shaped the island's landscape and mythology for as long as people have lived there.
Her parentage places her at an intersection that Sicilian folk tradition would recognize: the Watchers of the Book of Enoch were angels who crossed a boundary they were told not to cross, who taught forbidden knowledge to human women, and who were punished for it. Lilith, depending on the tradition, is either the first woman or the first refusal — the one who would not be placed beneath anyone. Their daughter, the Lupa, inherits both impulses: the transgression and the sovereignty. She is not worshipped in the trilogy. She is dealt with. Which is, historically, closer to how the folk tradition understood its relationships with powerful entities.
Why the Moon, Why the Women, Why Now
The question underneath all of this is not supernatural — or not only supernatural. It is about what gets passed down through women across generations, and what the dominant culture does its best to suppress, assimilate, or explain away. Sicilian stregoneria survived the Inquisition. It survived emigration. It survived the particular pressure placed on Italian-American families to become legible, to become assimilated, to set aside the old things in exchange for belonging.
The Di Luna women do not set aside the old things. They carry them across an ocean and into the twentieth century, and the tension between that inheritance and the world they actually live in is where the story lives. The luna strega is not a relic. She is a woman who knows exactly what she is made of — and what, therefore, she is capable of.
That knowledge has a cost. It also has a power that nothing else quite replicates. The crescent mark does not ask permission. It simply appears, in its own time, in its own color, on the skin of the woman who was always going to carry it.
The full story of how that mark was made — and what Serafina Di Luna gave up and gained in the shadow of Mongibello in 1099 — begins with 1099: Blood of the Lupa. If the tradition described here resonates with you, the Luna Strega store carries objects rooted in the same world, and you can find more writing on Sicilian folk magic and the series on the Luna Strega blog.