May 2, 2024 • 39 mins
One of the leading theories of Lorenza’s murder is that she was killed because she was a witch who crossed the wrong person? A strega, in Sicilian.
What exactly is a Sicilian witch and what would she have done if she were one? What does it mean to call a woman a witch and why has it been used throughout history to put women in danger?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Now, I think it's pretty clear that something bad did
happen to her.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Your father had his story that she was like the
witch doctor. Well, that's even more interesting.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
There have been so many theories about what happened to Lorenza.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
At this point, I.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Really believe that the best way forward may be to
start ruling out motives and theories and see what we're
left with.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Your father said that she killed the mayor's son or
daughter whatever with her stuff, and that's why they killed her.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Period.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
So let's set aside the mafia theory that we talked
about in the last episode for a second and look
into my dad's idea and the one that is very
prevalent with the women in my family, the witch theory.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I'm job Piazza.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
This is the Sicilian Inheritance, chapter five, in search of
my Strganna. I'm just trying to kind of drop myself
into her life. That yeah, Oh, that's one.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Of the abandoned churches.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
After we visited the scene of the crime, we spent
some time just wandering around Calta, in the part of
town where Lorenza would have lived. It's high up on
the hill. The air feels different up here, it's misty,
almost magical. This is right where the dense streets of
the town start hitting the sheer, rocky cliffs. So you
(01:55):
want to hear something cool. So the Virgin here is
always bigger than Jesus. We came across a statue of
the Virgin Mary. I love statues of the Virgin Mary
in Sicily because they just radiate strength and power. This
is not a meek woman, This is a goddess. They
(02:16):
took all of the old Greek myths and the myths
from Carthaginians, like a Starte and then Diana and Aphredae,
and they.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Put all of those stories on the Virgin and that's why.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
They accept the Christianity. But Jesus, they're like, so she's
always bigger. Mary. Here is a presence. She's wearing a
massive white and gold cape that flares out around her
body in a pyramid, not unlike a mountain, not unlike
this mountain that we are standing on top of. Her
(02:50):
head is surrounded in a glowing halo of celestial objects,
a sizeable circle, not a teeny tiny angel halo. No, no, no,
this is a crown. And she also always has a
halo that's like the moon for the God. And then
there's like a little.
Speaker 5 (03:08):
Devil hollywater because they are in eternal fights, and the
Virgin is protecticd of course the angel, although I.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Think she's protecting them both.
Speaker 5 (03:26):
She looks like because evil is part of the good,
and is part of evil.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Evil is part of the good.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I love the idea that what some people consider to
be doing good, others consider evil, and vice versa. Sicily
is a place where magic still exists. You can believe
in the Virgin Mary and also the evil Eye. The
(04:00):
spirits of the ancestors are also very much alive here.
They exist within the mountains and the trees. Someone once
even told me that they inhabit the bodies of cats
in called Polota. So, of course, in a way, the
Virgin Mary here becomes a mashup of all of these
Greek myths and Christian beliefs. She's a healer, she's a mother,
(04:23):
and she's also this wonderful, witchy goddess, and it makes sense.
Sicily has a deep history of healers and spiritualists. They've
been called many, many names. One of them that I
love so much is the done k Autano, or women
(04:45):
who help and also strega, which does translate to which,
but really it's more than that. It's more like a
wise person who practices peasant medicine to help women. If
you know the word strega as an American, it's probably
from Strega Nona, the children's book about a smiling old
(05:09):
crone and her dufus assistant, Big Anthony. But beyond that,
Strega is not a word that comes up a lot
in my research. While I was digging and digging through
the archives in Kultwolota, it was incredibly hard to find
out if Lorenza was a Strega. It's not like it's
(05:30):
written on official documents anywhere. Lorenza Marsala the profession witch.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
In fact, on.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Her official papers she's listed as two different things. When
she was younger, when she got married, she's listed as
a woman who spins wool into yarn, and then later
on she's listed as a farmer.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
I asked around in.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Coult Kolota, but when you start asking anyone about witches,
you end up just getting knowing laugh, a sound that
is almost a cackle, and then silence, And so ultimately
I ended up back where this whole thing started with
some very proud Sicilian Americans.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Hello, this is Laurie Bruno. May you have the best
of all coming to you, and may all your good
dreams come true.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
I tried, but I could not find a single Strega
in Cantabalota or anywhere else in Sicily. But when I
googled Strega, I found Lori Bruno.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Thank you and blessings forever to you and all that
you love.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Laurie is a second generation Italian. Her parents are from
Sicily and Naples. She grew up in Brooklyn and now
lives in Salem, Massachusetts. Yes, that's Salem, America's very own
witch city, and Laurie has written a lot about being
a modern day stranger. Laurie believes that her powers are
(07:02):
passed down through the female bloodline, and this is how
she describes herself. Laurie Bruno is a hereditary high priestess
and elder of the Sicilian Strega line of the craft
of the Wise. So I called her, obviously, and I
just straight up ast her. What is a stregat your
(07:27):
sag straight?
Speaker 6 (07:28):
This is.
Speaker 7 (07:30):
A folk wore, the folklore you know, the natural magic.
Speaker 8 (07:37):
Okay, mm hmmmga like the country which she stays there,
heals people, bless his babies.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
According to Lourie, Astraga is so much more than what
we think of as a witch. Like I said earlier,
the word also means healer apothecary, often a midwee kind
of like a country witch who tends to people's daily problems,
(08:06):
their problems with their relationships, and also their health. It
seems to cover all of the things that women did
as doctors without calling them doctors. And then Strega also
has a little bit of the supernatural throne in we
were healers.
Speaker 8 (08:23):
Nobody head, hey us, we did the thing with the
oil and the water and the fire.
Speaker 7 (08:30):
And we removed what they called the malakia. What's that
the evil eyes?
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Oh right, that's.
Speaker 7 (08:40):
The evil eye.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
Is envy.
Speaker 4 (08:42):
The people would actually get sick with it.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Ah, the evil eye. I'm sure you've heard of the
evil eye. It's a sort of spiritual sickness caused by
other people's envy. It comes up a lot in southern Italy,
and it's believed that you can see if someone has
been struck with the malochik you by dropping olive oil
into a bowl of water. If the oil turns into
(09:06):
the shape of an eye. Then you've been a victim.
You have had a spell cast on you. Diagnosing and
curing the evil eye is classic Stragus stuff.
Speaker 7 (09:17):
We believe in reincarnation.
Speaker 8 (09:20):
It was said those who believe in reincarnation are the
most formidable human beings are the face of the.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Fo Reincarnation made me think of that Virgin Mary statue. Well,
and I'd also heard that Sicilian women kind of kept
the lineages and just changing the idol. So they took
the goddess the Starte and the Goddess Diana of the
(09:48):
moon and just kind of moved her powers into the Virgin.
Speaker 8 (09:50):
Maryly, look at the Virgin Mary that stands on top
of the moon.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
Maria Abezayana. We were to hide right up to their noses.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Hide right under their noses. From what Laurie knew, these
women operated in secret, or if not in secret, at
least very quietly. They wouldn't have left any kind of
paper trail. And this makes sense in a country converting
to Catholicism, in a country very much controlled by men,
(10:28):
being a woman with a supernatural power or with any
power simply wasn't safe to advertise and.
Speaker 6 (10:37):
That's what it is.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Do you understand?
Speaker 6 (10:40):
Yeah? With nevil leaves.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
We look at the moon, we say mother Moon, dear Diana,
mother de.
Speaker 8 (10:49):
La fella, mother deo.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
Uverso are you the may amlia auto l mondo m
h which means.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
To help me, help my family, help the whole world?
Speaker 6 (11:03):
Yes, mm hmmm, that's what it is, very simply put.
That is our bread.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Was it dangerous for women to do this than.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Yes, that very dang.
Speaker 7 (11:25):
My ancestress looked burning because you heal people with the plate.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Laurie could not say whether or not Lorenza may have
been killed for being a strega.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
How could she?
Speaker 1 (11:41):
But I will tell you one witch always leads to
another witch, and you can never talk to too many.
Speaker 7 (11:47):
I think that these women probably always cause a little
bit of trepidation in others because they were working with
spiritual forces and they had that kind of power. But
it was more of a respect than a fear.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
That is Teresa Dientino another self identified strega in the
United States. She has a pretty similar story to mine. Actually,
she had grown up being told that her great grandmother
was a straga, but without any kind of actual idea
of what that really meant.
Speaker 7 (12:20):
They were constantly talking about seeing an ancestor in the
room or knowing someone had been here. There were stories
about hauntings and visitations, so in the hearing about the straga,
there was also an acceptance of what I would call
the otherworldly, but no one had the tradition really intact.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So in your research, what did you learn about about
the strega?
Speaker 7 (12:47):
Okay, so I take a deep side because it's been
such a long journey to try to really find information
and I don't know if you had this situation, but
there's very little available on what a drega was.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Teresa dug into whatever history she could find, which wasn't much,
and she spoke to plenty of modern day practitioners who
were also not easy to find in Italy, and she
finally came to an understanding of what her great grandmother
might have been doing, a lot of which seems to
be supporting women in all phases of their lives.
Speaker 7 (13:25):
She knew what herbs to help with fertility, to help
with infertility, you know, potions for love, A really important
person that helped the women in all their needs, and
they would go to her and there was secrecy and
they could trust her, and I just felt like losing
that role in our lives has been hugely devastating, hugely.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
The Strega were wise women, healers, people who tended to
their community. Would that have been enough to make them
targets of some kind? I've said this before. Throughout history,
calling a woman a witch has really just been an
excuse to kill her, whether in the witch hunts or
(14:12):
the Inquisition, and women accused of being witches were definitely
killed in Sicily in the fourteen and fifteen hundreds, but
at least one expert that I spoke to told me
that in Lorenza's time, she didn't think that being a
healer would put a target on your back. Still, I
hate that. I hate the way that the dona Kitano,
(14:36):
the women who help, becomes the strega, the witch, the witch,
the witch. And that's one thing, you know, and my
family always said witch. They didn't say strega. I didn't
know the words strega until I started doing my own research.
They always said witch. And I think it's worth reclaiming
that word because it's a healer, it's a healer, it's
(14:59):
a care her.
Speaker 7 (15:00):
Yeah, My aunt scolded me when I used the word witch.
She said, Nonah would not have wanted to be called
a witch.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Now there's another idea out there, and this is one
that I read about in my research, particularly in this
one paper by the academic Sabina Maglioco. This idea is
that Italian Americans took this very real history of women
healers and stragas and the unique Italian Christianity with its
(15:31):
goddess e Madonnas, and then they put their own spin
on it. They created this sort of embellished image of
the Strega, these women in secret societies who carried on
an unbroken pagan tradition from ancient times until now. It's
sort of like this way to bring the old world
(15:52):
into the new world, to connect Italian Americans back to
the good old, magical Sicily, and it does help explain
why it was hard to find people who consider themselves
descendants of Strega in Italy itself.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Now do I believe any of this, I don't know.
Part of me doesn't want to.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
I mean, I really want to be a part of
a thousands year old Strega lady tradition, A Strega lady cult.
But I do think it is interesting this idea that
second and third and fourth generation Italian Americans like me
might want to tell a little bit of a tall tale,
(16:35):
maybe just a slightly overblown story about their connection to
the Old Country through ancient goddess folklore and magic.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
But here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
At the risk of getting a little bit woo woo,
I mean that train has already left the station. The
closer that I get to Lorenza, the more that I
learn about her, the more that I walk around her
village and get a sense of her life, the more
it strangely feels like she is with me, like she
wanted this story to be told, and maybe, just maybe
(17:14):
I was the only person who could tell it. Maybe
there is something to passing down knowledge and strength, and
dare I say it, even some kind of witchy power
through the generations. But if Lorenza is using her straga
powers to send me a message from beyond the grave,
(17:35):
I'm not getting it. I'm sorry, Lorenza, I don't speak
Sicilian dialect. So yeah, we're trying to figure out if
she was a midwife. So can we see if she
delivered any babies after spending days in libraries. Arguing with Clerks,
I went through decades, decades of birth records, hoping to
(17:57):
see Lorenza Marsala.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
A baby died or a mother died.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
But she wasn't there. There were other midwives listed, lots
of them, and sometimes the absence of information is information
in itself. So at least now we can rule out
that Lorenzo was an official midwife. We also went through
the Book of Death looking for any deaths of a
(18:23):
child around the time that she was killed.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
There's nothing there.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
So Lorenza, if you're listening to this podcast right now,
give me a sign, girl, give me a sign. Otherwise
we've really hit a strega dead end. And maybe it's
just another story that my family told themselves to feel
connected to Sicily, to feel better about Lorenza's loss. Right now,
(18:52):
we are going to rule out the witch motive, but
what about the other theories and what about Niccolo Martino,
mystery man Niccolo Martino. It's really time to start digging
in a Nicolo Martino so that we can shed some
light on that part of this mystery.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
That's after the break. You hear that, do you hear that?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
That's the gentle lapping of the Mediterranean Sea on the
fine golden sand. By the magic of podcasting, you can
almost feel the heat of the sun, the cool of
the water, and the smell of the orange blossoms.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
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Speaker 1 (19:39):
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(20:23):
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Also enjoy with something delicious Vafari.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
I've Google mapped it.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, the place where we think Lorenza died along with
mystery man, Nicolo Martino, is five kilometers outside of town.
The house where she supposedly lived is right in Cultboa.
It's right around the corner from that Virgin Mary statue.
Speaker 5 (21:04):
Yeah, that makes up the same road.
Speaker 6 (21:06):
Road is Okay.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Someone's fiddy, soone's fidy. Someone's in a fight, a fight.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
We're walking through these twisty streets in search of where
Lorenza might have lived.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
I think we were supposed to go that street. Someone's
tossing some furniture.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
My uncle Jimmy told me, and I'm not sure where
he got this, that the family house was at forty
five ben Fari Street around Benfari.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
That's fun. I'm this town really is a labyrinth. Here's
forty two.
Speaker 5 (21:45):
Yeah, that's what we're looking for.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Forty five.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
Oh look, thirty this is it.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, this is it.
Speaker 6 (21:54):
There just used to be something over the number.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
The street number is thirty thirty Benfari Street, not forty five.
Thanks for that, Uncle Jimmy.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is it.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Oh, I'm not bad. It's just a tiny, tiny house
with all it's the concrete apartment built into the side
of the mountain.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Yeah, I'll bet you I'll bet if she had a
view of us sea. Wow, it's a teeny tiny narrow building,
so narrow that I can stretch my arms wide and
be able to touch both of the walls. I very
much doubt that that much has changed since Lorenzo lived here.
(22:41):
We're only about a five minute walk from the center
of town, and from here you can see both the craggy,
gorgeous mountains above and the sea off to the west.
The air smells salty and fresh, and it's beautiful, but
it's also a bit of a ghost town. Many of
these old stone houses seem abandoned, but also in some
(23:05):
cases still furnished. You can see inside and it's almost
like Pompeii. Their chairs covered in inches of dust, kitchen
tables with cracked plates, but no one living there. There's
one garage where it looks like an explosion happened. An
entire burnt out husk of a car just sits there,
(23:25):
chaw abandoned, except for this woman hanging out of a
window in the house next door. I'm a little bit
worried because she's too old to really be hanging out
the window like that. Our translator, Torre, explains what we're doing,
(23:46):
and it turns out she might be our distant cousin.
Go figure. I think everyone in this town is related.
And she's eager to tell us what she knows about
this house, which is not much.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
She says that the people who lived.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
In this house were named Garrado, which, if you recall
from that giant family tree that I made, is my
great grandmother, a Cursia's family name. That's Santa's wife, a
Cursia Grotto. But was part of your family.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
So they could have taken over the house. Yeah, they
could have taken.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Over the house, of course, But it turns out, according
to the woman hanging from the window, they're no longer around.
Speaker 5 (24:39):
No one is here anymore. Here, No, don't want to
live in here anymore.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Seeing this house gives me just another piece of Lorenzo's puzzle,
Like between that stretch of land where she died and
the maze of this town and now this little slice
of a house, I'm starting to collect the fragments of
a mosaic, the fragments and the sense of a life
(25:08):
in the lore of Lorenza Marsala. My family has always
focused so much on her death, only on her death,
really but being here, all I can think about is
her actual life, the full life that she lived until
her fifties. She was a mother, a daughter, a sister,
maybe a lover, who knows. And now I'm wondering about
(25:32):
that long decade that she spent on her own between
when her husband and all of her sons left for
the United States in nineteen sixteen when she was killed.
During that time period, about a million people left sicily,
most of the men, and they left behind a lot
of women, just like Lorenza. Way, think about that.
Speaker 7 (25:55):
So your dude leave, But first of all, I think
about the pape of life.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Then going to Plaimo was crazy.
Speaker 7 (26:01):
Yes, let a little cross the seat, so your man goes.
Speaker 6 (26:05):
It could be months, if not years, before you get
a fucking letter.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
It's might not even being able to read right, right,
you can't read. The majority of women were illiterate. Yeah,
they probably didn't get a letter.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
There was no phone. There were no phones.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah, they didn't get a letter for months or even years.
Sometimes money would come home, sometimes it wouldn't. For some women,
the men just disappeared and they had no idea whatever
happened to them. Some of the men got new entirely
new families in America and just didn't come back. When
I first started imagining Lorenza, I pictured her as just
(26:39):
a wife and a mother. This woman trapped in her house,
raising her kids, dutifully waiting for her husband to return,
or she was just waiting for her husband to call
her to America.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
She was constantly in.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Preparation to move to this new land. And I wish
that this was not the place that my mind went.
I really feel that this image has been programmed into
me somehow. But when I have chatted up the older
women in town, they start to tell a different story.
They say that they've heard from their own grandmothers that
(27:16):
as the men started working further and further from home,
it totally changed life for women in these small Sicilian
towns all of a sudden, with the men gone, they
were learning to read and write and do accounting and
working outside of the home in brand new ways.
Speaker 6 (27:34):
The towns were very much spaces for women, children, and
old people.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
This is Linda Reader. She's a professor of history and
the chair of Women's and Gender Studies at the University
of Missouri here in the States. But her research was
some of the best academic information that I found about
the daily lives of Sicilian women around the time that
Lorenza and also the characters in my book were alive.
(28:03):
Linda was actually researching migration from Sicily when it first
dawned on her.
Speaker 6 (28:09):
They're all men, they're all married. What happened to the women.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
I mean, I feel like if more historians could just
ask that question, what happened.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
To the women?
Speaker 1 (28:17):
What she found is that even before Sicilian men started
immigrating to the United States and elsewhere in huge numbers,
towns like Cultabalota were often sort of run by women.
Speaker 6 (28:29):
They would leave the town for most of the week,
come back Friday Saturday, and they would live out in
the countryside.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
The men were always working away from home.
Speaker 6 (28:41):
So you start to see women, particularly women whose husbands
were migrating.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Husbands and sons who were sending money back home.
Speaker 6 (28:52):
These women had more access to cash. They're buying up houses,
They're investing in certain ways. Within the community.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Women controlled the real estate. They may have even been
running shops and operating businesses called Tobaloto was known for
wool production. So knowing this, just thinking about this and
staring at Lorenzo's front door. I now know that she
wouldn't have been stuck in her house mixing up a sauce.
(29:22):
This was an intensely communal life that women were very
much a part of. People lived in these small, crowded
villages for a reason. It's what you have to do
to survive in an isolated town on the top of
a mountain. But even more so when nearly half the
population has left for America. So it checks out that
(29:44):
Lorenza would have been very much in charge of the
family's land and all of their interests back home in Sicily.
But also what was she doing with her husband gone?
And it does make me think a little bit about
Ciro's theory of something going on with Nicolo Martino. I
(30:05):
will say, once I saw that Antonino Piazza was gone
for so long before Lorenzo was killed, I did think
it was odd. I thought it was strange that Lorenza
stayed there for so many years before following her husband
and sons to America. I asked Linda read her about it,
(30:27):
and she said it was common and frankly, a lot
of times the men got very comfortable in America and
they wanted to stay, but the women were like mm mmm, no, no,
I am not having that.
Speaker 6 (30:38):
So there's a lot of back and forth, much more
than we expected, until at some point somebody's saying, no,
I want to settle in the United States. I want
to stay here. That often created points of conflict.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Linda even found this trove of letters that Sicilian women
wrote to their local governments saying their husbands had sent
them tickets to come to America and they wanted the
state to officially intervene and tell their husbands no thanks.
Speaker 6 (31:08):
Saying, look, I don't want to go to America. He
sent me tickets. I don't want to go. This wasn't
the deal, and just tell him I'm not coming.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
The deal was that you go, you make money.
Speaker 6 (31:19):
I don't want to join it, and you come back,
and you come back and we'll buy land here. A
lot of men did come back.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Within five years. Between thirty and fifty percent of this
generation of immigrants did return home to Italy, and they
were known as the RETERNATEI but not our family. It
has always been a core part of this story. All
of the Piazzas intended to leave eventually, including Lorenza, if
(31:48):
only she hadn't been killed. How common was it for
a woman to be violently killed?
Speaker 6 (31:55):
I mean, there are certainly early stories in the history
of the mafia. There's a famous case in Palatimo of
a woman who wouldn't take fraudulent banknotes from the local
mafia guide, and they used all sorts of methods of
intimidation ended up killing her daughter and then killing her.
So I don't think it's off the table, but it's.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Not very common, Linda said, sure, it could have been
a land deal gone wrong, but she had a theory
of her own.
Speaker 6 (32:26):
When you first told me about her death, I immediately
thought some form of an honor killing. Those were the
more prevalent killings and homicides you see.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
And what exactly is an honor killing.
Speaker 6 (32:41):
It's an extension of domestic violence in many ways, ways
in which a family is trying to respond to a
perceived attack on the family's respectability, their name, their reputation
by disciplining women's body and women's sexualities.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
What if Chiro is right, What if Lorenzo was having
an affair with Nicolo Martino or with someone else? Could
she have been killed by one of the men in
our own family, even Antonino, her husband.
Speaker 6 (33:19):
That's where you see the more violence on women, right
and you know.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
We thought about that too when we discovered that she
was killed alongside another man. Could this have been her husband?
I don't think a lot of my family members are
going to like this theory. We have not found any
records of him coming back, nor was she pregnant again after.
Speaker 6 (33:42):
He left, so he may never have returned.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
We don't think that he returned. As of right now.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
We don't have any evidence that Antonino went back to
Sicily after he left for America. We have one idea
that maybe maybe their son Joseph also known as Jesseppe,
went back to avenge his mother's death, but that would
have been well after Lorenzo was killed, and anyway, we
still don't know if that really happened. More on that later,
(34:11):
I promise, But there were a lot of sons and
there were a lot of family members still left in Sicily.
Antonino wouldn't have had to kill Lorenzo himself for this
to be a crime within the family if it weren't
honor killing. He didn't do it, but could a husband
have someone else do that for him?
Speaker 6 (34:32):
There could be somebody else in the family who would
do it. But you know, the proxy doesn't make a
lot of sense here either.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Why not?
Speaker 6 (34:41):
You know, I do think that experience of migration transforms
ideas of what it means to be a man and
what it means to be a woman. And I'm not
sure that he would mobilize those resources and use that
social and cultural capital to respond if in fact he's
never coming back to that world.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Look, I am no Sicilian witch, or maybe i am,
but I've got this gut feeling now that Lorenza never
planned to leave Sicily, that she was never meant to
join Antonino in the United States, as my family has
always believed. Maybe she did expect her husband to come
(35:26):
home one day, But from everything I can tell, he
was attempting to build a life in America, as were
their sons, and I think maybe she was building her
own life in Sicily. So maybe Linda's right. Maybe there
are some hallmarks of an honor killing. There's another man,
(35:46):
there's an avenging son. But in other ways it doesn't
totally make sense. Lorenzo was fifty four, Nicolo Martino was
in his seventies. What would the family be defending in
the old world if they've already established themselves in the
new one. But it is intriguing, and yeah, this is
(36:13):
definitely a new potential motive. I sadly have to hop
because I have to take care of my own children,
because a woman and a mother's work has never finished.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Linda never never.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Apparently the smoke is really really bad in Plermo.
Speaker 6 (36:47):
Yeah, can I see, I'll show you.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Two weeks into our trip to Sicily, just as my
image of Lorenzo was really coming into focus, we hit
major roadblock. The island was on fire.
Speaker 7 (37:09):
Moment, the whole place.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Guy fucking burned to the ground. Jesus Christ, that's the
towns we went through.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Those are the towns wait, yea.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
The little towns that we'd just driven through. The hotels
that we stayed in, many of them were now surrounded
by flames. Smoke was in the air everywhere, and we
had planned to talk to more people, to visit more archives,
but it just didn't feel safe or smart.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Just sending messages to Chiero and everyone making sure they're okay.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Once again, it does feel a little bit like divine
intervention is stopping our family from figuring out exactly what
happened to Lorenza. I was disappointed that we had to leave,
that we had to cancel so many of our interviews,
but we had a lot of new leads, including remember
(38:01):
how I said I didn't think anyone from the family
moved back to Cappelotta. Yeah, it turns out that someone did.
Speaker 7 (38:08):
For to get to the point where you show up
at your brother's home with a pistol, tells me that
this is a feud that's been going on for a while.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
That's coming up on The Sicilian Inheritance. The Sicilian Inheritance
is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The
series is produced by Jen Kenney, Kate Osborne, Dara Potts
and me Joe Piazza, with key help from Laura Lee
(38:38):
Watson of Digging Up Your Roots in the Boot and
Chiro Grillow of Sicily Roots. Many thanks to Julia Paraviccini
and the Ancestry dot com research department. You can get
your copy of The Sicilian Inheritance the novel right now
at Truly anywhere that you get your books, anywhere you
get your books. It's got the same name as the podcast,
(38:59):
but with my Food, Wine and sucks. Also do not
forget to get a taste of Sicily in the form
of delicious Sicilian olive oil at Cardena's tap room. Make
sure to check out our show notes for a link
to buy it, or if you find yourself in Philly
just stop by. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, mangosh
(39:19):
Heitikador Costas Linos, and Oz Wolloshan. From iHeart, executive producers
are Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Etour. We also want to
thank will Pearson, Connell Byrne, Bob Pittman, and John Mary
Napolis
Now, I think it's pretty clear that something bad did
happen to her.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Your father had his story that she was like the
witch doctor. Well, that's even more interesting.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
There have been so many theories about what happened to Lorenza.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
At this point, I.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Really believe that the best way forward may be to
start ruling out motives and theories and see what we're
left with.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Your father said that she killed the mayor's son or
daughter whatever with her stuff, and that's why they killed her.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Period.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
So let's set aside the mafia theory that we talked
about in the last episode for a second and look
into my dad's idea and the one that is very
prevalent with the women in my family, the witch theory.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I'm job Piazza.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
This is the Sicilian Inheritance, chapter five, in search of
my Strganna. I'm just trying to kind of drop myself
into her life. That yeah, Oh, that's one.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Of the abandoned churches.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
After we visited the scene of the crime, we spent
some time just wandering around Calta, in the part of
town where Lorenza would have lived. It's high up on
the hill. The air feels different up here, it's misty,
almost magical. This is right where the dense streets of
the town start hitting the sheer, rocky cliffs. So you
(01:55):
want to hear something cool. So the Virgin here is
always bigger than Jesus. We came across a statue of
the Virgin Mary. I love statues of the Virgin Mary
in Sicily because they just radiate strength and power. This
is not a meek woman, This is a goddess. They
(02:16):
took all of the old Greek myths and the myths
from Carthaginians, like a Starte and then Diana and Aphredae,
and they.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Put all of those stories on the Virgin and that's why.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
They accept the Christianity. But Jesus, they're like, so she's
always bigger. Mary. Here is a presence. She's wearing a
massive white and gold cape that flares out around her
body in a pyramid, not unlike a mountain, not unlike
this mountain that we are standing on top of. Her
(02:50):
head is surrounded in a glowing halo of celestial objects,
a sizeable circle, not a teeny tiny angel halo. No, no, no,
this is a crown. And she also always has a
halo that's like the moon for the God. And then
there's like a little.
Speaker 5 (03:08):
Devil hollywater because they are in eternal fights, and the
Virgin is protecticd of course the angel, although I.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Think she's protecting them both.
Speaker 5 (03:26):
She looks like because evil is part of the good,
and is part of evil.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Evil is part of the good.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I love the idea that what some people consider to
be doing good, others consider evil, and vice versa. Sicily
is a place where magic still exists. You can believe
in the Virgin Mary and also the evil Eye. The
(04:00):
spirits of the ancestors are also very much alive here.
They exist within the mountains and the trees. Someone once
even told me that they inhabit the bodies of cats
in called Polota. So, of course, in a way, the
Virgin Mary here becomes a mashup of all of these
Greek myths and Christian beliefs. She's a healer, she's a mother,
(04:23):
and she's also this wonderful, witchy goddess, and it makes sense.
Sicily has a deep history of healers and spiritualists. They've
been called many, many names. One of them that I
love so much is the done k Autano, or women
(04:45):
who help and also strega, which does translate to which,
but really it's more than that. It's more like a
wise person who practices peasant medicine to help women. If
you know the word strega as an American, it's probably
from Strega Nona, the children's book about a smiling old
(05:09):
crone and her dufus assistant, Big Anthony. But beyond that,
Strega is not a word that comes up a lot
in my research. While I was digging and digging through
the archives in Kultwolota, it was incredibly hard to find
out if Lorenza was a Strega. It's not like it's
(05:30):
written on official documents anywhere. Lorenza Marsala the profession witch.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
In fact, on.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Her official papers she's listed as two different things. When
she was younger, when she got married, she's listed as
a woman who spins wool into yarn, and then later
on she's listed as a farmer.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
I asked around in.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Coult Kolota, but when you start asking anyone about witches,
you end up just getting knowing laugh, a sound that
is almost a cackle, and then silence, And so ultimately
I ended up back where this whole thing started with
some very proud Sicilian Americans.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Hello, this is Laurie Bruno. May you have the best
of all coming to you, and may all your good
dreams come true.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
I tried, but I could not find a single Strega
in Cantabalota or anywhere else in Sicily. But when I
googled Strega, I found Lori Bruno.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Thank you and blessings forever to you and all that
you love.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Laurie is a second generation Italian. Her parents are from
Sicily and Naples. She grew up in Brooklyn and now
lives in Salem, Massachusetts. Yes, that's Salem, America's very own
witch city, and Laurie has written a lot about being
a modern day stranger. Laurie believes that her powers are
(07:02):
passed down through the female bloodline, and this is how
she describes herself. Laurie Bruno is a hereditary high priestess
and elder of the Sicilian Strega line of the craft
of the Wise. So I called her, obviously, and I
just straight up ast her. What is a stregat your
(07:27):
sag straight?
Speaker 6 (07:28):
This is.
Speaker 7 (07:30):
A folk wore, the folklore you know, the natural magic.
Speaker 8 (07:37):
Okay, mm hmmmga like the country which she stays there,
heals people, bless his babies.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
According to Lourie, Astraga is so much more than what
we think of as a witch. Like I said earlier,
the word also means healer apothecary, often a midwee kind
of like a country witch who tends to people's daily problems,
(08:06):
their problems with their relationships, and also their health. It
seems to cover all of the things that women did
as doctors without calling them doctors. And then Strega also
has a little bit of the supernatural throne in we
were healers.
Speaker 8 (08:23):
Nobody head, hey us, we did the thing with the
oil and the water and the fire.
Speaker 7 (08:30):
And we removed what they called the malakia. What's that
the evil eyes?
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Oh right, that's.
Speaker 7 (08:40):
The evil eye.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
Is envy.
Speaker 4 (08:42):
The people would actually get sick with it.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Ah, the evil eye. I'm sure you've heard of the
evil eye. It's a sort of spiritual sickness caused by
other people's envy. It comes up a lot in southern Italy,
and it's believed that you can see if someone has
been struck with the malochik you by dropping olive oil
into a bowl of water. If the oil turns into
(09:06):
the shape of an eye. Then you've been a victim.
You have had a spell cast on you. Diagnosing and
curing the evil eye is classic Stragus stuff.
Speaker 7 (09:17):
We believe in reincarnation.
Speaker 8 (09:20):
It was said those who believe in reincarnation are the
most formidable human beings are the face of the.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Fo Reincarnation made me think of that Virgin Mary statue. Well,
and I'd also heard that Sicilian women kind of kept
the lineages and just changing the idol. So they took
the goddess the Starte and the Goddess Diana of the
(09:48):
moon and just kind of moved her powers into the Virgin.
Speaker 8 (09:50):
Maryly, look at the Virgin Mary that stands on top
of the moon.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
Maria Abezayana. We were to hide right up to their noses.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Hide right under their noses. From what Laurie knew, these
women operated in secret, or if not in secret, at
least very quietly. They wouldn't have left any kind of
paper trail. And this makes sense in a country converting
to Catholicism, in a country very much controlled by men,
(10:28):
being a woman with a supernatural power or with any
power simply wasn't safe to advertise and.
Speaker 6 (10:37):
That's what it is.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Do you understand?
Speaker 6 (10:40):
Yeah? With nevil leaves.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
We look at the moon, we say mother Moon, dear Diana,
mother de.
Speaker 8 (10:49):
La fella, mother deo.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
Uverso are you the may amlia auto l mondo m
h which means.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
To help me, help my family, help the whole world?
Speaker 6 (11:03):
Yes, mm hmmm, that's what it is, very simply put.
That is our bread.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Was it dangerous for women to do this than.
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Yes, that very dang.
Speaker 7 (11:25):
My ancestress looked burning because you heal people with the plate.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Laurie could not say whether or not Lorenza may have
been killed for being a strega.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
How could she?
Speaker 1 (11:41):
But I will tell you one witch always leads to
another witch, and you can never talk to too many.
Speaker 7 (11:47):
I think that these women probably always cause a little
bit of trepidation in others because they were working with
spiritual forces and they had that kind of power. But
it was more of a respect than a fear.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
That is Teresa Dientino another self identified strega in the
United States. She has a pretty similar story to mine. Actually,
she had grown up being told that her great grandmother
was a straga, but without any kind of actual idea
of what that really meant.
Speaker 7 (12:20):
They were constantly talking about seeing an ancestor in the
room or knowing someone had been here. There were stories
about hauntings and visitations, so in the hearing about the straga,
there was also an acceptance of what I would call
the otherworldly, but no one had the tradition really intact.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So in your research, what did you learn about about
the strega?
Speaker 7 (12:47):
Okay, so I take a deep side because it's been
such a long journey to try to really find information
and I don't know if you had this situation, but
there's very little available on what a drega was.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Teresa dug into whatever history she could find, which wasn't much,
and she spoke to plenty of modern day practitioners who
were also not easy to find in Italy, and she
finally came to an understanding of what her great grandmother
might have been doing, a lot of which seems to
be supporting women in all phases of their lives.
Speaker 7 (13:25):
She knew what herbs to help with fertility, to help
with infertility, you know, potions for love, A really important
person that helped the women in all their needs, and
they would go to her and there was secrecy and
they could trust her, and I just felt like losing
that role in our lives has been hugely devastating, hugely.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
The Strega were wise women, healers, people who tended to
their community. Would that have been enough to make them
targets of some kind? I've said this before. Throughout history,
calling a woman a witch has really just been an
excuse to kill her, whether in the witch hunts or
(14:12):
the Inquisition, and women accused of being witches were definitely
killed in Sicily in the fourteen and fifteen hundreds, but
at least one expert that I spoke to told me
that in Lorenza's time, she didn't think that being a
healer would put a target on your back. Still, I
hate that. I hate the way that the dona Kitano,
(14:36):
the women who help, becomes the strega, the witch, the witch,
the witch. And that's one thing, you know, and my
family always said witch. They didn't say strega. I didn't
know the words strega until I started doing my own research.
They always said witch. And I think it's worth reclaiming
that word because it's a healer, it's a healer, it's
(14:59):
a care her.
Speaker 7 (15:00):
Yeah, My aunt scolded me when I used the word witch.
She said, Nonah would not have wanted to be called
a witch.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Now there's another idea out there, and this is one
that I read about in my research, particularly in this
one paper by the academic Sabina Maglioco. This idea is
that Italian Americans took this very real history of women
healers and stragas and the unique Italian Christianity with its
(15:31):
goddess e Madonnas, and then they put their own spin
on it. They created this sort of embellished image of
the Strega, these women in secret societies who carried on
an unbroken pagan tradition from ancient times until now. It's
sort of like this way to bring the old world
(15:52):
into the new world, to connect Italian Americans back to
the good old, magical Sicily, and it does help explain
why it was hard to find people who consider themselves
descendants of Strega in Italy itself.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Now do I believe any of this, I don't know.
Part of me doesn't want to.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
I mean, I really want to be a part of
a thousands year old Strega lady tradition, A Strega lady cult.
But I do think it is interesting this idea that
second and third and fourth generation Italian Americans like me
might want to tell a little bit of a tall tale,
(16:35):
maybe just a slightly overblown story about their connection to
the Old Country through ancient goddess folklore and magic.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
But here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
At the risk of getting a little bit woo woo,
I mean that train has already left the station. The
closer that I get to Lorenza, the more that I
learn about her, the more that I walk around her
village and get a sense of her life, the more
it strangely feels like she is with me, like she
wanted this story to be told, and maybe, just maybe
(17:14):
I was the only person who could tell it. Maybe
there is something to passing down knowledge and strength, and
dare I say it, even some kind of witchy power
through the generations. But if Lorenza is using her straga
powers to send me a message from beyond the grave,
(17:35):
I'm not getting it. I'm sorry, Lorenza, I don't speak
Sicilian dialect. So yeah, we're trying to figure out if
she was a midwife. So can we see if she
delivered any babies after spending days in libraries. Arguing with Clerks,
I went through decades, decades of birth records, hoping to
(17:57):
see Lorenza Marsala.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
A baby died or a mother died.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
But she wasn't there. There were other midwives listed, lots
of them, and sometimes the absence of information is information
in itself. So at least now we can rule out
that Lorenzo was an official midwife. We also went through
the Book of Death looking for any deaths of a
(18:23):
child around the time that she was killed.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
There's nothing there.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
So Lorenza, if you're listening to this podcast right now,
give me a sign, girl, give me a sign. Otherwise
we've really hit a strega dead end. And maybe it's
just another story that my family told themselves to feel
connected to Sicily, to feel better about Lorenza's loss. Right now,
(18:52):
we are going to rule out the witch motive, but
what about the other theories and what about Niccolo Martino,
mystery man Niccolo Martino. It's really time to start digging
in a Nicolo Martino so that we can shed some
light on that part of this mystery.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
That's after the break. You hear that, do you hear that?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
That's the gentle lapping of the Mediterranean Sea on the
fine golden sand. By the magic of podcasting, you can
almost feel the heat of the sun, the cool of
the water, and the smell of the orange blossoms.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Now, with a.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Few short clicks, you can taste it too, because we
have actually imported the finest Sicilian olive oil. Inspired by
this very podcast, We've partnered with Philadelphia's own Cardenis Gourmet
Foods to bring you the Sicilian Inheritance Olive Oil, a
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(20:01):
special terroir that family secrets and inherited stories provide. It's
got a taste of fresh off the vine, tomatoes and
a hint of almonds. You can get your own bottle
today at Cardenas Taproom. Check the show notes for the
link and all the details to buy. It's not only
an incredible olive oil, but it will completely transport you
(20:23):
to the beautiful and sometimes dangerous island of Sicily. So
please do check out the show notes now and thank you.
Also enjoy with something delicious Vafari.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
I've Google mapped it.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, the place where we think Lorenza died along with
mystery man, Nicolo Martino, is five kilometers outside of town.
The house where she supposedly lived is right in Cultboa.
It's right around the corner from that Virgin Mary statue.
Speaker 5 (21:04):
Yeah, that makes up the same road.
Speaker 6 (21:06):
Road is Okay.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Someone's fiddy, soone's fidy. Someone's in a fight, a fight.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
We're walking through these twisty streets in search of where
Lorenza might have lived.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
I think we were supposed to go that street. Someone's
tossing some furniture.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
My uncle Jimmy told me, and I'm not sure where
he got this, that the family house was at forty
five ben Fari Street around Benfari.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
That's fun. I'm this town really is a labyrinth. Here's
forty two.
Speaker 5 (21:45):
Yeah, that's what we're looking for.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Forty five.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
Oh look, thirty this is it.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, this is it.
Speaker 6 (21:54):
There just used to be something over the number.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
The street number is thirty thirty Benfari Street, not forty five.
Thanks for that, Uncle Jimmy.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is it.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Oh, I'm not bad. It's just a tiny, tiny house
with all it's the concrete apartment built into the side
of the mountain.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Yeah, I'll bet you I'll bet if she had a
view of us sea. Wow, it's a teeny tiny narrow building,
so narrow that I can stretch my arms wide and
be able to touch both of the walls. I very
much doubt that that much has changed since Lorenzo lived here.
(22:41):
We're only about a five minute walk from the center
of town, and from here you can see both the craggy,
gorgeous mountains above and the sea off to the west.
The air smells salty and fresh, and it's beautiful, but
it's also a bit of a ghost town. Many of
these old stone houses seem abandoned, but also in some
(23:05):
cases still furnished. You can see inside and it's almost
like Pompeii. Their chairs covered in inches of dust, kitchen
tables with cracked plates, but no one living there. There's
one garage where it looks like an explosion happened. An
entire burnt out husk of a car just sits there,
(23:25):
chaw abandoned, except for this woman hanging out of a
window in the house next door. I'm a little bit
worried because she's too old to really be hanging out
the window like that. Our translator, Torre, explains what we're doing,
(23:46):
and it turns out she might be our distant cousin.
Go figure. I think everyone in this town is related.
And she's eager to tell us what she knows about
this house, which is not much.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
She says that the people who lived.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
In this house were named Garrado, which, if you recall
from that giant family tree that I made, is my
great grandmother, a Cursia's family name. That's Santa's wife, a
Cursia Grotto. But was part of your family.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
So they could have taken over the house. Yeah, they
could have taken.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Over the house, of course, But it turns out, according
to the woman hanging from the window, they're no longer around.
Speaker 5 (24:39):
No one is here anymore. Here, No, don't want to
live in here anymore.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Seeing this house gives me just another piece of Lorenzo's puzzle,
Like between that stretch of land where she died and
the maze of this town and now this little slice
of a house, I'm starting to collect the fragments of
a mosaic, the fragments and the sense of a life
(25:08):
in the lore of Lorenza Marsala. My family has always
focused so much on her death, only on her death,
really but being here, all I can think about is
her actual life, the full life that she lived until
her fifties. She was a mother, a daughter, a sister,
maybe a lover, who knows. And now I'm wondering about
(25:32):
that long decade that she spent on her own between
when her husband and all of her sons left for
the United States in nineteen sixteen when she was killed.
During that time period, about a million people left sicily,
most of the men, and they left behind a lot
of women, just like Lorenza. Way, think about that.
Speaker 7 (25:55):
So your dude leave, But first of all, I think
about the pape of life.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Then going to Plaimo was crazy.
Speaker 7 (26:01):
Yes, let a little cross the seat, so your man goes.
Speaker 6 (26:05):
It could be months, if not years, before you get
a fucking letter.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
It's might not even being able to read right, right,
you can't read. The majority of women were illiterate. Yeah,
they probably didn't get a letter.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
There was no phone. There were no phones.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah, they didn't get a letter for months or even years.
Sometimes money would come home, sometimes it wouldn't. For some women,
the men just disappeared and they had no idea whatever
happened to them. Some of the men got new entirely
new families in America and just didn't come back. When
I first started imagining Lorenza, I pictured her as just
(26:39):
a wife and a mother. This woman trapped in her house,
raising her kids, dutifully waiting for her husband to return,
or she was just waiting for her husband to call
her to America.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
She was constantly in.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Preparation to move to this new land. And I wish
that this was not the place that my mind went.
I really feel that this image has been programmed into
me somehow. But when I have chatted up the older
women in town, they start to tell a different story.
They say that they've heard from their own grandmothers that
(27:16):
as the men started working further and further from home,
it totally changed life for women in these small Sicilian
towns all of a sudden, with the men gone, they
were learning to read and write and do accounting and
working outside of the home in brand new ways.
Speaker 6 (27:34):
The towns were very much spaces for women, children, and
old people.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
This is Linda Reader. She's a professor of history and
the chair of Women's and Gender Studies at the University
of Missouri here in the States. But her research was
some of the best academic information that I found about
the daily lives of Sicilian women around the time that
Lorenza and also the characters in my book were alive.
(28:03):
Linda was actually researching migration from Sicily when it first
dawned on her.
Speaker 6 (28:09):
They're all men, they're all married. What happened to the women.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
I mean, I feel like if more historians could just
ask that question, what happened.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
To the women?
Speaker 1 (28:17):
What she found is that even before Sicilian men started
immigrating to the United States and elsewhere in huge numbers,
towns like Cultabalota were often sort of run by women.
Speaker 6 (28:29):
They would leave the town for most of the week,
come back Friday Saturday, and they would live out in
the countryside.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
The men were always working away from home.
Speaker 6 (28:41):
So you start to see women, particularly women whose husbands
were migrating.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Husbands and sons who were sending money back home.
Speaker 6 (28:52):
These women had more access to cash. They're buying up houses,
They're investing in certain ways. Within the community.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Women controlled the real estate. They may have even been
running shops and operating businesses called Tobaloto was known for
wool production. So knowing this, just thinking about this and
staring at Lorenzo's front door. I now know that she
wouldn't have been stuck in her house mixing up a sauce.
(29:22):
This was an intensely communal life that women were very
much a part of. People lived in these small, crowded
villages for a reason. It's what you have to do
to survive in an isolated town on the top of
a mountain. But even more so when nearly half the
population has left for America. So it checks out that
(29:44):
Lorenza would have been very much in charge of the
family's land and all of their interests back home in Sicily.
But also what was she doing with her husband gone?
And it does make me think a little bit about
Ciro's theory of something going on with Nicolo Martino. I
(30:05):
will say, once I saw that Antonino Piazza was gone
for so long before Lorenzo was killed, I did think
it was odd. I thought it was strange that Lorenza
stayed there for so many years before following her husband
and sons to America. I asked Linda read her about it,
(30:27):
and she said it was common and frankly, a lot
of times the men got very comfortable in America and
they wanted to stay, but the women were like mm mmm, no, no,
I am not having that.
Speaker 6 (30:38):
So there's a lot of back and forth, much more
than we expected, until at some point somebody's saying, no,
I want to settle in the United States. I want
to stay here. That often created points of conflict.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Linda even found this trove of letters that Sicilian women
wrote to their local governments saying their husbands had sent
them tickets to come to America and they wanted the
state to officially intervene and tell their husbands no thanks.
Speaker 6 (31:08):
Saying, look, I don't want to go to America. He
sent me tickets. I don't want to go. This wasn't
the deal, and just tell him I'm not coming.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
The deal was that you go, you make money.
Speaker 6 (31:19):
I don't want to join it, and you come back,
and you come back and we'll buy land here. A
lot of men did come back.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Within five years. Between thirty and fifty percent of this
generation of immigrants did return home to Italy, and they
were known as the RETERNATEI but not our family. It
has always been a core part of this story. All
of the Piazzas intended to leave eventually, including Lorenza, if
(31:48):
only she hadn't been killed. How common was it for
a woman to be violently killed?
Speaker 6 (31:55):
I mean, there are certainly early stories in the history
of the mafia. There's a famous case in Palatimo of
a woman who wouldn't take fraudulent banknotes from the local
mafia guide, and they used all sorts of methods of
intimidation ended up killing her daughter and then killing her.
So I don't think it's off the table, but it's.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Not very common, Linda said, sure, it could have been
a land deal gone wrong, but she had a theory
of her own.
Speaker 6 (32:26):
When you first told me about her death, I immediately
thought some form of an honor killing. Those were the
more prevalent killings and homicides you see.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
And what exactly is an honor killing.
Speaker 6 (32:41):
It's an extension of domestic violence in many ways, ways
in which a family is trying to respond to a
perceived attack on the family's respectability, their name, their reputation
by disciplining women's body and women's sexualities.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
What if Chiro is right, What if Lorenzo was having
an affair with Nicolo Martino or with someone else? Could
she have been killed by one of the men in
our own family, even Antonino, her husband.
Speaker 6 (33:19):
That's where you see the more violence on women, right
and you know.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
We thought about that too when we discovered that she
was killed alongside another man. Could this have been her husband?
I don't think a lot of my family members are
going to like this theory. We have not found any
records of him coming back, nor was she pregnant again after.
Speaker 6 (33:42):
He left, so he may never have returned.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
We don't think that he returned. As of right now.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
We don't have any evidence that Antonino went back to
Sicily after he left for America. We have one idea
that maybe maybe their son Joseph also known as Jesseppe,
went back to avenge his mother's death, but that would
have been well after Lorenzo was killed, and anyway, we
still don't know if that really happened. More on that later,
(34:11):
I promise, But there were a lot of sons and
there were a lot of family members still left in Sicily.
Antonino wouldn't have had to kill Lorenzo himself for this
to be a crime within the family if it weren't
honor killing. He didn't do it, but could a husband
have someone else do that for him?
Speaker 6 (34:32):
There could be somebody else in the family who would
do it. But you know, the proxy doesn't make a
lot of sense here either.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Why not?
Speaker 6 (34:41):
You know, I do think that experience of migration transforms
ideas of what it means to be a man and
what it means to be a woman. And I'm not
sure that he would mobilize those resources and use that
social and cultural capital to respond if in fact he's
never coming back to that world.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Look, I am no Sicilian witch, or maybe i am,
but I've got this gut feeling now that Lorenza never
planned to leave Sicily, that she was never meant to
join Antonino in the United States, as my family has
always believed. Maybe she did expect her husband to come
(35:26):
home one day, But from everything I can tell, he
was attempting to build a life in America, as were
their sons, and I think maybe she was building her
own life in Sicily. So maybe Linda's right. Maybe there
are some hallmarks of an honor killing. There's another man,
(35:46):
there's an avenging son. But in other ways it doesn't
totally make sense. Lorenzo was fifty four, Nicolo Martino was
in his seventies. What would the family be defending in
the old world if they've already established themselves in the
new one. But it is intriguing, and yeah, this is
(36:13):
definitely a new potential motive. I sadly have to hop
because I have to take care of my own children,
because a woman and a mother's work has never finished.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Linda never never.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Apparently the smoke is really really bad in Plermo.
Speaker 6 (36:47):
Yeah, can I see, I'll show you.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Two weeks into our trip to Sicily, just as my
image of Lorenzo was really coming into focus, we hit
major roadblock. The island was on fire.
Speaker 7 (37:09):
Moment, the whole place.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Guy fucking burned to the ground. Jesus Christ, that's the
towns we went through.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Those are the towns wait, yea.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
The little towns that we'd just driven through. The hotels
that we stayed in, many of them were now surrounded
by flames. Smoke was in the air everywhere, and we
had planned to talk to more people, to visit more archives,
but it just didn't feel safe or smart.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Just sending messages to Chiero and everyone making sure they're okay.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Once again, it does feel a little bit like divine
intervention is stopping our family from figuring out exactly what
happened to Lorenza. I was disappointed that we had to leave,
that we had to cancel so many of our interviews,
but we had a lot of new leads, including remember
(38:01):
how I said I didn't think anyone from the family
moved back to Cappelotta. Yeah, it turns out that someone did.
Speaker 7 (38:08):
For to get to the point where you show up
at your brother's home with a pistol, tells me that
this is a feud that's been going on for a while.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
That's coming up on The Sicilian Inheritance. The Sicilian Inheritance
is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The
series is produced by Jen Kenney, Kate Osborne, Dara Potts
and me Joe Piazza, with key help from Laura Lee
(38:38):
Watson of Digging Up Your Roots in the Boot and
Chiro Grillow of Sicily Roots. Many thanks to Julia Paraviccini
and the Ancestry dot com research department. You can get
your copy of The Sicilian Inheritance the novel right now
at Truly anywhere that you get your books, anywhere you
get your books. It's got the same name as the podcast,
(38:59):
but with my Food, Wine and sucks. Also do not
forget to get a taste of Sicily in the form
of delicious Sicilian olive oil at Cardena's tap room. Make
sure to check out our show notes for a link
to buy it, or if you find yourself in Philly
just stop by. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, mangosh
(39:19):
Heitikador Costas Linos, and Oz Wolloshan. From iHeart, executive producers
are Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Etour. We also want to
thank will Pearson, Connell Byrne, Bob Pittman, and John Mary
Napolis
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