May 17, 2024 • 36 mins
Journalist Jo Piazza’s family has been playing a hundred year long game of telephone about the murder of her great great grandmother Lorenza Marsala. Family members who have gone back to Sicily to discover the truth, including Jo’s dad have been shut down by authorities and threatened by seemingly supernatural forces.
But Jo is determined, maybe even a little obsessed, to cut through the stories, the lies and the mythologies to find out the truth, even if her family members don’t want her to.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Wilder fans, Joe here. Now I know and I
know this because I've heard from so many of you
that you love a road trip. That you love a
road trip and an adventure and a meaty podcast that
just digs into the lives of women. So I've got
another show for you, and this time it's personal. I'm
(00:23):
so excited to drop this episode of The Sicilian Inheritance
into the feed today. About four years ago, I started
writing a novel that was loosely based on the murder
of my great great grandmother, Lorenza Marsala. It's called The
Sicilian Inheritance. It came out six weeks ago and it's delicious.
It's a delicious murder mystery. It's being called the Book
(00:45):
of a Summer. You're gonna love it. But that's not
what this podcast is about. The Sicilian Inheritance of the
podcast is a true crime murder mystery where I travel
back to Sicily occasionally with my three children under the
age of six, to try to solve the real life
murder of Lorenza Marsala. I dig through archives, I interview
(01:07):
people in the village where she's from. I got access
to the homicide and murder record from the year nineteen
sixteen when she died. When I went into this reporting,
I wasn't even sure if the story of my family's
been telling forever and ever what's actually true. I thought
maybe she wasn't even murdered at all. But the bombshells
(01:30):
that I've dug up through the reporting, I mean, I
have just been personally blown away. And more importantly, I
haven't just found out more about Lorenzo's death, but I
found out more about her life, and frankly, those are
the stories that we need to be telling. I want
to know more about how women lived in the year
(01:51):
nineteen sixteen, and we've got all of that in here.
So take a road trip to Sicily with me. Come on,
let's hop on a plane and eat delicious four hour lunches.
This is the first episode of The Sicilian Inheritance. If
you love it, you can find it wherever you get
your podcasts. We're still making it, I'm still reporting. I
(02:13):
am still solving this murder literally in real time. I
just can't wait for you to listen to this. Enjoy hi, babe, eh,
(02:34):
I'm trying to solve a mystery.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Charlie, Charlie what do you need? What do you need?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Disco little still work?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
What's wrong with them? I think you've had them on
upside down?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Man.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
I'm sitting by the pool in Sciapello, Sicily, with my
podcast producer Kate and my three kids and cool easy.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Do you want to hear about the family mystery?
Speaker 1 (02:55):
No?
Speaker 4 (02:56):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah? You want this?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Hell, Charlie is much more interested in the very deep
pool b is freezing mystery. Everyone's jet lagged, and I'm
questioning every decision that I've ever made about my life.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Bease, do you know why we're here in Sicily?
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (03:16):
I'm trying to solve the mystery of my great great grandmother.
Of her Can I say, murdered to a three year old?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Her death, her deaf? How she died? Ha, We don't
know yet. We're trying to figure it out. We're trying
to learn. Do you want to help me?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
I'm not exactly sure what possessed me when I made
this plan jetting off to Sicily with a five month
old baby, a three year old and a six year
old for a vacation slash fact funding mission to look
for clues into my investigation into my great great grandmother's
century old murder right here in our motherland.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Do you want to know what her name was? Her
name was Laurene. Can you say that, Lorenza.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
I keep telling myself that if we can learn something new,
something more concrete about what happened to her, it will
all be worth it. But just being here it all
feels more real. She feels more real, and we are
closer closer to figuring out if my great great grandmother
(04:27):
really was murdered right here on this island, and if so, why,
I'm Joe Piazza from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is
the Sicilian Inheritance, Chapter one, Lorenza, So to take me
(05:04):
to the Do you like remember the first time you
heard this? It's hard to say. I feel like I've
always known this story because Italian Americans love to tell stories,
and they love to embellish stories, and especially if it's
really salacious or it could possibly have something to do
with the mafia.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
They love that shit.
Speaker 6 (05:25):
Can you just walk me through the Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
The story. The story.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
The story is one that I've known all my life.
I've heard it over and over and over again, not
always in the same way, and definitely not with the
same information. It's my family's origin story, the story of
where we the Piazzas came from. It all starts a
little over one hundred years ago with my great great
(05:51):
grandparents back in Sicily, the ancestral homeland as far as
my dad's side of the family is concerned, my great
great grandfather, father Antonino, and my great great grandmother Lorenza
lived in this tiny village called Caltibalota, where they had
seven children one by one. Around nineteen ten, Antonino and
(06:12):
his son saved up enough money to sail to the US,
passed through Ellis Island, and settle in the northeast the
classic Italian American story. Lorenzo was supposed to follow them eventually,
but she never made it. She died in Caltibalotta. According
to my family's one hundred year long game of telephone,
(06:34):
she was murdered. For years, this story has just been
a mystery for our family, something we've enjoyed speculating about,
swapping different bits and pieces and versions of the story.
As you'd say in Italian, laqierra quiera idle gossip.
Speaker 7 (06:55):
Hello, Hey Sharon, how you doing.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
I'm okay. I hear you're writing my memoir and I'm
going to be some famous now, right you are?
Speaker 7 (07:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the plan.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
And the story was always told with a kind of
hand gesture where you push your thumb into your nose
and lower your voice when you say the black hand
or the mafia.
Speaker 5 (07:18):
Now in Sicily there's still tons of mafia, and of
course they called it the black Hand.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Which is why for me, for a long time, I
thought the whole thing might be bullshit.
Speaker 7 (07:29):
Well, nobody knows for sure. There's two stories.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
But over the years, as I've heard it more and more,
Lorenza's story and her potential murder have become a bit
of an obsession. Maybe that's because we're a family of storytellers,
sometimes liars, definitely myth makers, myself included. I'm a writer,
(07:52):
and recently I turned my fascination with Lorenza into a novel.
It's also called The Sicilian Inheritance, and it is loosely,
loosely based on my family story. A woman is left alone,
there's an unsolved murder. There's just a lot more food
and wine and sex thrown in. And look, my obsession
(08:14):
with this story. This family story may have ended there,
but the writing it got me fixated on the real
story and the real woman, who was the real Lorenza
Marsala and what actually happened to her. So I started digging,
and I began with my best sources, my family. The
(08:38):
first thing I'm.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Doing is asking different family members what they think the
story is, what did they allow?
Speaker 6 (08:43):
Good luck with that?
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Good luck with that?
Speaker 7 (08:47):
Oh, dear Hi, how are you good?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
This is Uncle Jimmy. He's my dad's older brother. I
want to hear everything.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
You know. Well, I don't know any more than probably
you do. But Jimmy and I've been talking about it,
and our one concern is if it's two realistic, you're
going to wind up Startinger Vendetta again. And I'm too
old to go over there and shoot somebody. Jimmy wants
to bring his kids over there.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Are you too old to go over there and shoot somebody?
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Uncle jim Are you real well?
Speaker 1 (09:20):
I'll sho Vendetta or not. I kept calling relatives.
Speaker 7 (09:25):
You know that you have this book coming up. I
didn't know what was finished.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
That was Aunt Gail when I was growing up. She
lived down the street. She was like a second mom
to me.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
I sat at writing sex scenes okay, like I am, like,
I have to get like real drunk to write them.
I hope you don't write too many sex scenes drunk
all the time.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Cousin Sissy, she's a romance novelist. Cousin Sharon, Cousin Laura.
We have a lot of cousins. We are Italian Americans.
We breed like a Rabbit's.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
All I know is just obviously here.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Okay.
Speaker 5 (09:57):
So here's what I was told Grandpa. My grandpa said,
the Piazza immigrated to the US.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Sons came over with his siblings.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Large family and her ancestors siblings had immigrated.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
And boys came over to kind of settle in, and
you know all of that. So they came through out
of island, battled in New York.
Speaker 7 (10:21):
The boys came over from Italy.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Two by two they immigrated and dad came with him,
but they left mom behind.
Speaker 7 (10:29):
They left their mother behind, the mother to sell the farm.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
His wife stayed behind to tend to She said they
had a family farm. What I heard was that the
mom was interested in her land. She refused to sell you.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
This part.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
I don't know if it's true. I don't know who
told me, whether it was there or not or somebody else.
But they had a vineyards and the black Hand took
over the vineyards, so they have natural access to the vineyard.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
The black Hand. That's how my family tends to refer
to the mafia in this story. It is not how
Sicilians refer to the mafia. I just want everyone to
know that. But this right here, this is the reigning
theory of how Lorenzo was killed. And it's the version
of the story that's been in my head the longest.
(11:25):
It's the version where the Piazzas owned a farm or
a vineyard. It is unclear. And once Antonino and all
of Lorenza's sons had been gone in the US for
over a decade, the mafia killed Lorenza to get that land.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
They owned a farm, and they left her behind. It
gives a transaction and mafia leisurely stroll it from and
killed her.
Speaker 7 (11:49):
She sold the farm and all the money was in
the house, and they killed her for the money.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
She was murdered while the boys were over here.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Maybe she had our head. He sold the land and
the mafia then killed her to get the money from
the land. Maybe it was that money that she was
planning to use to leave Cecily and finally reunite with
her family.
Speaker 7 (12:11):
They were kind of stupid to leave all that money.
But there were no bank center or anything, and that
was the money she was going to be using to
come to the United States and get them started. But
they were kind of stupid to leave her there alone
like that.
Speaker 5 (12:31):
What was her name?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
The name of whom.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
The great great grandmother who was murdered?
Speaker 7 (12:39):
Oh, oh, I forget, I forget her name, Oh, Lorenzo
and Marceille.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
For all the times that I've heard the story about
Lorenza being murdered, all the tellings and retellings, talking to
my relatives this time made me realize how little any
of us knew about her actual life or her death.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
For that matter.
Speaker 7 (13:04):
Did you hear how they killed her?
Speaker 3 (13:06):
No?
Speaker 6 (13:07):
I never heard any details of her death.
Speaker 5 (13:09):
Yante, and I didn't give any details. I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
That's the thing.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
There have never been any real details when this story
gets told, things that you can prove, And that's always
what's made me skeptical, Like, maybe it was never a murder.
Maybe her story could be as open and shut as
a case of the flu. Maybe she got sick and
that's why she.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Didn't make it over.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
A tragedy for sure for her sons and her daughters,
but not exactly worth the legend status. Maybe the family
needed to make her death into something more than just
a virus. My dad was a claims attorney, my uncle
Jimmy's a judge. Like we're like, we're a very basic
(13:58):
Italian American family. But they love imagining that there's some
kind of adventure and romance in possibly being adjacent to
the mafia, even though they're absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
And this story gives it to them.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
This story does give them that, this story gives them
some kind of connection, And I think that's what they
love about this story, Like if she was possibly killed
by the mob, why and like that gives them this
link to you know, Goodfellows as Apana's the Godfather. When
I started writing my novel, I didn't want to know
the real story. I wanted to use the small bits
(14:35):
and pieces that I knew about Lorenza to get started
and then let my imagination run wild with the rest.
But once the book was put to bed, I got
this tug in my gut. Something told me the story
wasn't finished. And that's when I needed to know the
truth about what happened to Lorenza. I became obsessed. What
(14:58):
really sent me looking for answers was this email from
my dad from about a decade ago. Toward the end
of his life, he used to send me dozens of
emails a day, and one day a couple of years ago,
when I was cleaning out my inbox, one of those
unopened emails caught my eye. It was his grandfather's birth certificate,
Santo's birth certificate, and in the email, my dad remarked
(15:21):
on how beautiful the mother's name was, Lorenza. She was
the one who was murdered. He reminded me in all caps.
That email got me to start doing a little more digging,
(15:42):
just a little bit of reporting, And as soon as
I scratched the surface, it started to look a lot
like I had one hundred year old murder mystery on
my hands.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Would there be a peace record, Yes, only in the
case of.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Martin, one that I'm pretty sure I'm gonna.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Be able to solve. I love You's want Why would
they be lettered together.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
More?
Speaker 1 (16:08):
After the break? Hey, y'all, Joe here, you may have
noticed that this show is a sort of travel log
Throughout this series, I am truly hoping that you feel
(16:30):
like you've gone on an expedition, adventure journey with me
to solve my great great grandmother's century old murder. Our
true intention is that by the end, you actually feel
like you've gone on both vacation and a fact finding
mission with me, traveling across the Atlantic to the gorgeous
(16:51):
Mediterranean island of Sicily, all through the magic of podcasting.
For me, Sicily has some real main character energy, and
I hope you feel it too. So to help drop
you even more into that experience, we want to offer
a warning with this podcast.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
I do not want you.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Listening to this without some delicious food. And so what
better way for me to continue to follow in my
father's sometimes haphazard footsteps and also be a champion of
one of Sicily's best exports then by bringing you some
actual Sicilian olive oil. I have actually partnered with Philadelphia's
(17:31):
own Cardinis Gourmet Foods. It is a woman owned and
operated shop to bring you the Sicilian inheritance olive oil.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I like to call it a flavor journey.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
From the volcanic soil of ancient groves through the special
Terhraar that family secrets and inherited stories provide yeah with
a taste of fresh off the vine tomatoes and a
hint of almonds. It is not only an incredible olive oil,
but we know that it is going to transport you
to the beauty full and sometimes dangerous island of Sicily.
(18:04):
So join us get even more into this journey by
getting your very own bottle today at Cardinis tap room.
You can check the show notes for the link and
the details, and of course, thank you, thank you, and
remember to enjoy this podcast with something delicious. I just
(18:27):
spent three hundred dollars on ancestry dot com. Oh did
as I tried to solve this mystery. I forced my
husband Nick to be my enthusiastic sounding board for all
of my discoveries. Here is Satin, I've got all the
dates there. There she is. That's her Wow, which of
(18:48):
course involved immediately googling genealogy websites.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
There's a picture of her.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
No way, look at that.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Have you never seen No, I've never seen this.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
She looks she looks unhappy. When you imagine an Italian Nona,
what do you think of a chubby lady in the
kitchen making pasta that is not Lorenza. Lorenza looks like
she could kill you with her stare. Her cheekbones alone
could cut glass. She looks like someone who might have
(19:20):
been involved in some shit. But this is very helpful
because now we have the death date.
Speaker 6 (19:25):
Yeah, or with the legged death date.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Right yeah yeah, whoa cool panda.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So before we go much further, I think I need
to draw my family tree for you all. In fact,
I now have a massive wall in my house where
I sketched it all out. Lorenzo Marcella my great great
grandmother on my dad's side. She was born in eighteen
sixty two. She married Antonino Piazza. Quick note here, just
(19:51):
to make things extra confusing. In Italy, women don't take
their husband's last names. Did you know that? I didn't
until we started doing this, So Lorenza kept the last
name Marsala Lorenza Marsala sounds like a pasta dish. Anyway.
Lorenza and Antonino had seven children who lived to adulthood.
(20:12):
I personally have three children, and I think seven is
a lot of children. Anything more than one is a
lot of children. Anyway, Lorenza and Antonino's kids First, we've
got Santo, he's my great grandfather. Then Joseph also known
as Giuseppe, Veto and Caligaro also known as Charlie, and
the daughters Josephine, Paulina, and Rosa. All of them would
(20:36):
eventually come to America. The men first, Santo, the oldest son,
and Giuseppe left Sicily in nineteen oh five. Now, just
to set the scene picture this pre World War One
turn of the century. A lot of Italians were immigrating
back then, especially the ones living in intense rural poverty
(20:57):
in southern Italy and Sicily. Between nineteen hundred and nineteen ten,
more than two million Italians made their way across the
Atlantic Ocean, and among them were Santo and his.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Brother, Lorenza's son.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Santo is my dad's grandfather, got it and he worked
in the coal mines and was also a farmer. This
is me trying to explain it all to Kate. It's
really hard to keep all this straight, and not that
Kate is the best at keeping it straight either.
Speaker 7 (21:26):
And presumably Santo told him.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
No, that's the thing. So Santo, like a lot of
other Sicilians at the time, settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania and
he goes to work in the coal mines. Two years later,
their father Antonino joins them, bringing along another son. By
nineteen twelve, most of the kids, all of the sons
(21:50):
are in the States. Lorenza and two of her daughters
are still in Sicily. In nineteen sixteen, Lorenza dies and
a few years later her daughters would immigrate to the
US too. Now Santo, the eldest son, he starts my
particular branch of the family tree. Santo is the grandfather
(22:11):
or great grandfather to all of my relatives that you've
heard so far.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
He held the big reunion one time where all of
the ass the first generation Piazzas were there. It was fantastic.
All my uncles and my dad were playing more which
is the finger game you know, rock stone scissors are
most and they played bacci on a dirt road and
(22:37):
it was a great time. And it's one of the
few times I have memories of seen all Santo's brothers
and sisters.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Santo also had a lot of children, ten of them.
And here the family tree gets even more confusing for
a lot of reasons, namely because everyone seems to have
the same names. There's so many Josette, Giuseppe's, Josephine's, Vetos, Vinnie's,
and then the names they get anglicized when people come
to the US. The Giuseppas become Joe's, the Lorenzo's become Lauras,
(23:11):
the Veto's become Vinnie's. You get the picture. Santo at
some point lived with each of his children, and for
as Sicilian as Santo was, he didn't like to talk
about Italy.
Speaker 5 (23:23):
I remember going there and my old great aunts would
get my face and squeeze it and hurt the hell
out of me and talk.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
An Italian cousin, Sharon, she's my second cousin. I think
I'm bad with the seconds and the thirds. Her mom,
Rose was one of Santo's children.
Speaker 5 (23:42):
Santo was very quiet about his past growing up. I
remember he wouldn't he didn't even want to acknowledge that
he was Italian for a while there, really, but yeah, yeah,
it was very strange. Somebody would come to the door
and see that he was clearly a with is you know,
deep accent, and he'd say, you're in America. Speak you
(24:05):
speak English? No Italian. I mean, he didn't want it
was strange. He was very close mouthed about much of
his younger life, very close, so it's worth investigating and
looking into.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Santo definitely didn't talk about what happened to his mother, Lorenza.
Speaker 6 (24:26):
Your dad knew the most.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
I think, didn't I know?
Speaker 1 (24:30):
But John, my dad and his siblings and cousins are
the complete opposite. They're obsessed with their Sicilian roots. Santo
was first generation. He wanted to hide being Sicilian so
he could fit in in this country, which for some
immigrants was a pretty common reaction. My dad, on the
(24:52):
other hand, he used to say things like capiche instead
of understand, or matzao instead of mozzarella. Pitch you this
Sicily nineteen twelve so that everyone would know he was Italian.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Everything from Sicily means something.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
My dad loved to pretend to be this kind of
tony soprano tough guy, especially with my high school boyfriends.
Sorry Kurtziegel, not with this Sicilian thing that's been going
on for two thousand years. In the early two thousands,
my dad started to get really sick with a rare
form of muscular dystrophe. But instead of saying housebound or
(25:33):
just feeling sorry for himself, in bed. Lorenzo's story became
this kind of unfinished business, and it seemed to light
a fire in him. He started researching genealogy and taking
trips to Sicily. By that time he had to use
a cane and a walker to get around, and his
(25:53):
obsession had gone into overdrive. It's like falling in love
with Sicily and with learning new things about his family
gave him this way to escape his broken body. He
did some crazy stuff too. He started he got this
hair brained idea to start importing Sicilian organic olive oil,
(26:14):
and he bought a shit ton of it. I think
he blew probably about one hundred grand on local Sicilian
olive oil. And then there was something wrong with the
caps and the labels and they leaked, and it just
sat in our garage for years and years, and he
just pissed away all of his remaining money on this
(26:34):
business that would never exist. But that was yet another
way to keep him going.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Back to Sicily.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
As he got sicker and less mobile, my dad could
still sit at a computer making calls and researching his
leads on Lorenzo's murder. At the time, I found all
of it a little bit silly. I was so disinterested
in this. And if you think about two thousand in college,
I was twenty years old, graduate, I moved to New York.
(27:04):
I'm not living with my parents. I could care less
about my dad's obsession with Cecily. I'm like, that seems
like a nice hobby for you, Dad, I'm happy for you.
But we never talked about it, and now I really
wish that we had. Like now, I really wish that
I'd paid more attention and I'd listened to the things
that he was finding out, because so much of it
is also just now gone. I can't find anything in
(27:27):
his email, I can't Facebook won't let me into his
Facebook account. So a lot of what he learned died
with him. A lot of parts of him are gone,
and he would hate that. He wanted to know the
answer to this mystery. And I wish that I'd been
there to help him, but I was on my own journey,
(27:50):
searching for a life partner, falling in love, getting married,
getting pregnant, and then he was gone. I never properly
agree for him at the time, and it's just been
hitting me now his legacy and what he left unfinished,
(28:10):
And now I feel like I owe him something by
finishing what he started. And why do you think you
care about it? Is it really like to do this
(28:32):
thing for your dad? Do you feel that you have
the same motivation he did or I think my motivation
is different than dad's. There's a part of me that
wants to do this because he didn't get to finish it,
And there's another part of me that wants to do
it because I feel like this woman's real story deserves
to be told, like for people to really know the
(28:54):
truth about what happened to her instead of just becoming
a character in everybody else's life. Lorenzo Marsala was born
in this village called Caltabolota, had a bunch of kids,
and died there at age fifty four. That's pretty much
all we know of her life. When she died, it
was nineteen sixteen. She still had two young daughters at home.
(29:19):
The First World War had just broken out. Now that
I'm a wife and a mother of three children, thank god,
it's not seven, her story just hits different. I'm getting
closer to Lorenza's age every year, and I can't stop
thinking about our family story. From her perspective, how did
(29:42):
she feel about being left behind by her husband for
more than a decade. Did she miss him or was
it liberating to finally not just be someone's wife, to
finally not be getting pregnant almost every single year.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Did she feel safe.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
In her own village? Was it okay because she had
a lot of her family members around her, or maybe
she was in constant danger in this village surrounded by
mafia bandits.
Speaker 6 (30:11):
I was asking somebody about her, and they just looked
at me and they kept saying morte, morte no, and
they're like they shut it down. They wouldn't talk.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Really, you just said the name. You're like Lorenzo Marsala Piazza,
and they.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Were like interesting.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Over the years, many of the Piazzas have gone back
to Sicily looking for answers about our family's past, and
a lot of them have returned with stories of dead
ends and also unsettling experiences that happened when they tried
to find out more about Lorenza.
Speaker 7 (30:50):
They knew they knew about it, right, we did.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
My uncle Jimmy claims that when he was in call,
a bunch of police officers warned him off this case.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
He said, you'd never drop it, not in any tripling
matter whatsoever. But just just as a matter of the
you don't want to start it off, you know, you
don't want the vendetta to continue.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
And if the warnings from the cops weren't enough, they
also got a sign from above.
Speaker 4 (31:23):
When we were there.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
We were at the church.
Speaker 6 (31:26):
Lightning struck the church. Okay, we were actually yeah, we
were in the church where they got married, and lightning
struck the steeple and I.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Want in it.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
While we were yeah, while we were out. Yeah, while
we were in the church. We were in with the
priest going through the records right in the in the rectory,
and lightning struck the top of the church. We had
to get out. Wow, my sister and Lisa, that is
a sign, get us out of here.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I'm starting to think that maybe my family doesn't want
to know what really happened. They're pretty attached to the
stories that they've been telling themselves for all these years.
Well that's interesting because I wonder how people will feel
like if we actually get to like a truth, will.
Speaker 7 (32:21):
It be disappointing or satisfying or you know, I.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Don't know if my family wants to know the actual truth.
That's the interesting thing. Like for as much as people
have come back here and tried to like dig up
more information, I think if the truth ended up being
less interesting than their story, I don't think they're going
to change their story. I think they're going to continue
(32:49):
to tell the story the way they want to tell
the story. But I need to know. I have to
solve this mystery. I don't know if it's for me,
or for my dad or for Lorenza, but I have
to solve it.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
So here I go.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
I'm looking for long lost relatives. I'm digging through archives
covered in dust and trying to trace back a family
history that's been twisted by secrets, omissions, and vengeance. I
can't do all of this from my desk in Philadelphia.
I've got to go back back to, as my dad
(33:23):
liked to call it, the Motherland. I've got to go
to Sicily, to the village of Caltabalota, where all of
this happened in the first place, back to where Lorenzo
was born, and maybe just maybe back to the very
spot where she was murdered.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Aside, there's a landslide. This is a place we have
the absolutely certainty one hundred and.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Ten honestly, a picture when she died.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
We don't have a picture of that. Actually, have you
got to see a video? Videos didn't exist.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I'm bringing all of you on my I'm her vacation
with my husband, three kids under the age of seven.
Everyone is coming to Sicily with me to solve this
one hundred year old murder. Now, I think it's pretty
clear that something bad did happen to her.
Speaker 7 (34:13):
Your father had his story that she was like the
witch doctor.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Could Lorenzo have been killed by the mafia for being
a witch?
Speaker 4 (34:23):
So I'm wondering, how is the story similar or different
than what you got? So I heard two stories. One
story is over land and the other story is that
she was a witch. Well that's even more interesting.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
That's all coming up on the Sicilian Inheritance.
Speaker 6 (34:42):
I'd love to know what the hell happened. Wouldn't it
be great to solve this mystery.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
I feel good my Sicilian witchy powers.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
I feel like we're on the right path.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
The Sicilian Inheritance is a Kaleidoscope reduction in partnership with
iHeart Podcasts. The series is produced by Jenkinney, Kate Osborne,
Dara Potts, and me Joe Piazza, with key help from
Laura Lee Watson of Digging Up Your Roots in the
Boot and Chiro Grillow of Sicily Roots. Many thanks to
Julia Paravaccini and the ancestry dot com research department. You
(35:22):
can get your copy of The Sicilian Inheritance the novel
right now at Truly anywhere that you get your books.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Anywhere you get your books.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
It's got the same name as the podcast, but with
more food, wine and secks. 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, Mangash, Hettikador, Costas Lino's
(35:56):
and Oz Wolloshan from iHeart executive producers are Trina Norvelle
and Nikki Etour. We also want to thank Will Pearson,
connel Byrne, Bob Pittman, and John Mary Napolis
Hey, Wilder fans, Joe here. Now I know and I
know this because I've heard from so many of you
that you love a road trip. That you love a
road trip and an adventure and a meaty podcast that
just digs into the lives of women. So I've got
another show for you, and this time it's personal. I'm
(00:23):
so excited to drop this episode of The Sicilian Inheritance
into the feed today. About four years ago, I started
writing a novel that was loosely based on the murder
of my great great grandmother, Lorenza Marsala. It's called The
Sicilian Inheritance. It came out six weeks ago and it's delicious.
It's a delicious murder mystery. It's being called the Book
(00:45):
of a Summer. You're gonna love it. But that's not
what this podcast is about. The Sicilian Inheritance of the
podcast is a true crime murder mystery where I travel
back to Sicily occasionally with my three children under the
age of six, to try to solve the real life
murder of Lorenza Marsala. I dig through archives, I interview
(01:07):
people in the village where she's from. I got access
to the homicide and murder record from the year nineteen
sixteen when she died. When I went into this reporting,
I wasn't even sure if the story of my family's
been telling forever and ever what's actually true. I thought
maybe she wasn't even murdered at all. But the bombshells
(01:30):
that I've dug up through the reporting, I mean, I
have just been personally blown away. And more importantly, I
haven't just found out more about Lorenzo's death, but I
found out more about her life, and frankly, those are
the stories that we need to be telling. I want
to know more about how women lived in the year
(01:51):
nineteen sixteen, and we've got all of that in here.
So take a road trip to Sicily with me. Come on,
let's hop on a plane and eat delicious four hour lunches.
This is the first episode of The Sicilian Inheritance. If
you love it, you can find it wherever you get
your podcasts. We're still making it, I'm still reporting. I
(02:13):
am still solving this murder literally in real time. I
just can't wait for you to listen to this. Enjoy hi, babe, eh,
(02:34):
I'm trying to solve a mystery.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Charlie, Charlie what do you need? What do you need?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Disco little still work?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
What's wrong with them? I think you've had them on
upside down?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Man.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
I'm sitting by the pool in Sciapello, Sicily, with my
podcast producer Kate and my three kids and cool easy.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Do you want to hear about the family mystery?
Speaker 1 (02:55):
No?
Speaker 4 (02:56):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah? You want this?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Hell, Charlie is much more interested in the very deep
pool b is freezing mystery. Everyone's jet lagged, and I'm
questioning every decision that I've ever made about my life.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Bease, do you know why we're here in Sicily?
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (03:16):
I'm trying to solve the mystery of my great great grandmother.
Of her Can I say, murdered to a three year old?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Her death, her deaf? How she died? Ha, We don't
know yet. We're trying to figure it out. We're trying
to learn. Do you want to help me?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
I'm not exactly sure what possessed me when I made
this plan jetting off to Sicily with a five month
old baby, a three year old and a six year
old for a vacation slash fact funding mission to look
for clues into my investigation into my great great grandmother's
century old murder right here in our motherland.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Do you want to know what her name was? Her
name was Laurene. Can you say that, Lorenza.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
I keep telling myself that if we can learn something new,
something more concrete about what happened to her, it will
all be worth it. But just being here it all
feels more real. She feels more real, and we are
closer closer to figuring out if my great great grandmother
(04:27):
really was murdered right here on this island, and if so, why,
I'm Joe Piazza from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is
the Sicilian Inheritance, Chapter one, Lorenza, So to take me
(05:04):
to the Do you like remember the first time you
heard this? It's hard to say. I feel like I've
always known this story because Italian Americans love to tell stories,
and they love to embellish stories, and especially if it's
really salacious or it could possibly have something to do
with the mafia.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
They love that shit.
Speaker 6 (05:25):
Can you just walk me through the Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
The story. The story.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
The story is one that I've known all my life.
I've heard it over and over and over again, not
always in the same way, and definitely not with the
same information. It's my family's origin story, the story of
where we the Piazzas came from. It all starts a
little over one hundred years ago with my great great
(05:51):
grandparents back in Sicily, the ancestral homeland as far as
my dad's side of the family is concerned, my great
great grandfather, father Antonino, and my great great grandmother Lorenza
lived in this tiny village called Caltibalota, where they had
seven children one by one. Around nineteen ten, Antonino and
(06:12):
his son saved up enough money to sail to the US,
passed through Ellis Island, and settle in the northeast the
classic Italian American story. Lorenzo was supposed to follow them eventually,
but she never made it. She died in Caltibalotta. According
to my family's one hundred year long game of telephone,
(06:34):
she was murdered. For years, this story has just been
a mystery for our family, something we've enjoyed speculating about,
swapping different bits and pieces and versions of the story.
As you'd say in Italian, laqierra quiera idle gossip.
Speaker 7 (06:55):
Hello, Hey Sharon, how you doing.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
I'm okay. I hear you're writing my memoir and I'm
going to be some famous now, right you are?
Speaker 7 (07:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the plan.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
And the story was always told with a kind of
hand gesture where you push your thumb into your nose
and lower your voice when you say the black hand
or the mafia.
Speaker 5 (07:18):
Now in Sicily there's still tons of mafia, and of
course they called it the black Hand.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Which is why for me, for a long time, I
thought the whole thing might be bullshit.
Speaker 7 (07:29):
Well, nobody knows for sure. There's two stories.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
But over the years, as I've heard it more and more,
Lorenza's story and her potential murder have become a bit
of an obsession. Maybe that's because we're a family of storytellers,
sometimes liars, definitely myth makers, myself included. I'm a writer,
(07:52):
and recently I turned my fascination with Lorenza into a novel.
It's also called The Sicilian Inheritance, and it is loosely,
loosely based on my family story. A woman is left alone,
there's an unsolved murder. There's just a lot more food
and wine and sex thrown in. And look, my obsession
(08:14):
with this story. This family story may have ended there,
but the writing it got me fixated on the real
story and the real woman, who was the real Lorenza
Marsala and what actually happened to her. So I started digging,
and I began with my best sources, my family. The
(08:38):
first thing I'm.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Doing is asking different family members what they think the
story is, what did they allow?
Speaker 6 (08:43):
Good luck with that?
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Good luck with that?
Speaker 7 (08:47):
Oh, dear Hi, how are you good?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
This is Uncle Jimmy. He's my dad's older brother. I
want to hear everything.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
You know. Well, I don't know any more than probably
you do. But Jimmy and I've been talking about it,
and our one concern is if it's two realistic, you're
going to wind up Startinger Vendetta again. And I'm too
old to go over there and shoot somebody. Jimmy wants
to bring his kids over there.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Are you too old to go over there and shoot somebody?
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Uncle jim Are you real well?
Speaker 1 (09:20):
I'll sho Vendetta or not. I kept calling relatives.
Speaker 7 (09:25):
You know that you have this book coming up. I
didn't know what was finished.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
That was Aunt Gail when I was growing up. She
lived down the street. She was like a second mom
to me.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
I sat at writing sex scenes okay, like I am, like,
I have to get like real drunk to write them.
I hope you don't write too many sex scenes drunk
all the time.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Cousin Sissy, she's a romance novelist. Cousin Sharon, Cousin Laura.
We have a lot of cousins. We are Italian Americans.
We breed like a Rabbit's.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
All I know is just obviously here.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Okay.
Speaker 5 (09:57):
So here's what I was told Grandpa. My grandpa said,
the Piazza immigrated to the US.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Sons came over with his siblings.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Large family and her ancestors siblings had immigrated.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
And boys came over to kind of settle in, and
you know all of that. So they came through out
of island, battled in New York.
Speaker 7 (10:21):
The boys came over from Italy.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Two by two they immigrated and dad came with him,
but they left mom behind.
Speaker 7 (10:29):
They left their mother behind, the mother to sell the farm.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
His wife stayed behind to tend to She said they
had a family farm. What I heard was that the
mom was interested in her land. She refused to sell you.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
This part.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
I don't know if it's true. I don't know who
told me, whether it was there or not or somebody else.
But they had a vineyards and the black Hand took
over the vineyards, so they have natural access to the vineyard.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
The black Hand. That's how my family tends to refer
to the mafia in this story. It is not how
Sicilians refer to the mafia. I just want everyone to
know that. But this right here, this is the reigning
theory of how Lorenzo was killed. And it's the version
of the story that's been in my head the longest.
(11:25):
It's the version where the Piazzas owned a farm or
a vineyard. It is unclear. And once Antonino and all
of Lorenza's sons had been gone in the US for
over a decade, the mafia killed Lorenza to get that land.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
They owned a farm, and they left her behind. It
gives a transaction and mafia leisurely stroll it from and
killed her.
Speaker 7 (11:49):
She sold the farm and all the money was in
the house, and they killed her for the money.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
She was murdered while the boys were over here.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Maybe she had our head. He sold the land and
the mafia then killed her to get the money from
the land. Maybe it was that money that she was
planning to use to leave Cecily and finally reunite with
her family.
Speaker 7 (12:11):
They were kind of stupid to leave all that money.
But there were no bank center or anything, and that
was the money she was going to be using to
come to the United States and get them started. But
they were kind of stupid to leave her there alone
like that.
Speaker 5 (12:31):
What was her name?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
The name of whom.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
The great great grandmother who was murdered?
Speaker 7 (12:39):
Oh, oh, I forget, I forget her name, Oh, Lorenzo
and Marceille.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
For all the times that I've heard the story about
Lorenza being murdered, all the tellings and retellings, talking to
my relatives this time made me realize how little any
of us knew about her actual life or her death.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
For that matter.
Speaker 7 (13:04):
Did you hear how they killed her?
Speaker 3 (13:06):
No?
Speaker 6 (13:07):
I never heard any details of her death.
Speaker 5 (13:09):
Yante, and I didn't give any details. I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
That's the thing.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
There have never been any real details when this story
gets told, things that you can prove, And that's always
what's made me skeptical, Like, maybe it was never a murder.
Maybe her story could be as open and shut as
a case of the flu. Maybe she got sick and
that's why she.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Didn't make it over.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
A tragedy for sure for her sons and her daughters,
but not exactly worth the legend status. Maybe the family
needed to make her death into something more than just
a virus. My dad was a claims attorney, my uncle
Jimmy's a judge. Like we're like, we're a very basic
(13:58):
Italian American family. But they love imagining that there's some
kind of adventure and romance in possibly being adjacent to
the mafia, even though they're absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
And this story gives it to them.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
This story does give them that, this story gives them
some kind of connection, And I think that's what they
love about this story, Like if she was possibly killed
by the mob, why and like that gives them this
link to you know, Goodfellows as Apana's the Godfather. When
I started writing my novel, I didn't want to know
the real story. I wanted to use the small bits
(14:35):
and pieces that I knew about Lorenza to get started
and then let my imagination run wild with the rest.
But once the book was put to bed, I got
this tug in my gut. Something told me the story
wasn't finished. And that's when I needed to know the
truth about what happened to Lorenza. I became obsessed. What
(14:58):
really sent me looking for answers was this email from
my dad from about a decade ago. Toward the end
of his life, he used to send me dozens of
emails a day, and one day a couple of years ago,
when I was cleaning out my inbox, one of those
unopened emails caught my eye. It was his grandfather's birth certificate,
Santo's birth certificate, and in the email, my dad remarked
(15:21):
on how beautiful the mother's name was, Lorenza. She was
the one who was murdered. He reminded me in all caps.
That email got me to start doing a little more digging,
(15:42):
just a little bit of reporting, And as soon as
I scratched the surface, it started to look a lot
like I had one hundred year old murder mystery on
my hands.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Would there be a peace record, Yes, only in the
case of.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Martin, one that I'm pretty sure I'm gonna.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Be able to solve. I love You's want Why would
they be lettered together.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
More?
Speaker 1 (16:08):
After the break? Hey, y'all, Joe here, you may have
noticed that this show is a sort of travel log
Throughout this series, I am truly hoping that you feel
(16:30):
like you've gone on an expedition, adventure journey with me
to solve my great great grandmother's century old murder. Our
true intention is that by the end, you actually feel
like you've gone on both vacation and a fact finding
mission with me, traveling across the Atlantic to the gorgeous
(16:51):
Mediterranean island of Sicily, all through the magic of podcasting.
For me, Sicily has some real main character energy, and
I hope you feel it too. So to help drop
you even more into that experience, we want to offer
a warning with this podcast.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
I do not want you.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Listening to this without some delicious food. And so what
better way for me to continue to follow in my
father's sometimes haphazard footsteps and also be a champion of
one of Sicily's best exports then by bringing you some
actual Sicilian olive oil. I have actually partnered with Philadelphia's
(17:31):
own Cardinis Gourmet Foods. It is a woman owned and
operated shop to bring you the Sicilian inheritance olive oil.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I like to call it a flavor journey.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
From the volcanic soil of ancient groves through the special
Terhraar that family secrets and inherited stories provide yeah with
a taste of fresh off the vine tomatoes and a
hint of almonds. It is not only an incredible olive oil,
but we know that it is going to transport you
to the beauty full and sometimes dangerous island of Sicily.
(18:04):
So join us get even more into this journey by
getting your very own bottle today at Cardinis tap room.
You can check the show notes for the link and
the details, and of course, thank you, thank you, and
remember to enjoy this podcast with something delicious. I just
(18:27):
spent three hundred dollars on ancestry dot com. Oh did
as I tried to solve this mystery. I forced my
husband Nick to be my enthusiastic sounding board for all
of my discoveries. Here is Satin, I've got all the
dates there. There she is. That's her Wow, which of
(18:48):
course involved immediately googling genealogy websites.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
There's a picture of her.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
No way, look at that.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Have you never seen No, I've never seen this.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
She looks she looks unhappy. When you imagine an Italian Nona,
what do you think of a chubby lady in the
kitchen making pasta that is not Lorenza. Lorenza looks like
she could kill you with her stare. Her cheekbones alone
could cut glass. She looks like someone who might have
(19:20):
been involved in some shit. But this is very helpful
because now we have the death date.
Speaker 6 (19:25):
Yeah, or with the legged death date.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Right yeah yeah, whoa cool panda.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So before we go much further, I think I need
to draw my family tree for you all. In fact,
I now have a massive wall in my house where
I sketched it all out. Lorenzo Marcella my great great
grandmother on my dad's side. She was born in eighteen
sixty two. She married Antonino Piazza. Quick note here, just
(19:51):
to make things extra confusing. In Italy, women don't take
their husband's last names. Did you know that? I didn't
until we started doing this, So Lorenza kept the last
name Marsala Lorenza Marsala sounds like a pasta dish. Anyway.
Lorenza and Antonino had seven children who lived to adulthood.
(20:12):
I personally have three children, and I think seven is
a lot of children. Anything more than one is a
lot of children. Anyway, Lorenza and Antonino's kids First, we've
got Santo, he's my great grandfather. Then Joseph also known
as Giuseppe, Veto and Caligaro also known as Charlie, and
the daughters Josephine, Paulina, and Rosa. All of them would
(20:36):
eventually come to America. The men first, Santo, the oldest son,
and Giuseppe left Sicily in nineteen oh five. Now, just
to set the scene picture this pre World War One
turn of the century. A lot of Italians were immigrating
back then, especially the ones living in intense rural poverty
(20:57):
in southern Italy and Sicily. Between nineteen hundred and nineteen ten,
more than two million Italians made their way across the
Atlantic Ocean, and among them were Santo and his.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Brother, Lorenza's son.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Santo is my dad's grandfather, got it and he worked
in the coal mines and was also a farmer. This
is me trying to explain it all to Kate. It's
really hard to keep all this straight, and not that
Kate is the best at keeping it straight either.
Speaker 7 (21:26):
And presumably Santo told him.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
No, that's the thing. So Santo, like a lot of
other Sicilians at the time, settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania and
he goes to work in the coal mines. Two years later,
their father Antonino joins them, bringing along another son. By
nineteen twelve, most of the kids, all of the sons
(21:50):
are in the States. Lorenza and two of her daughters
are still in Sicily. In nineteen sixteen, Lorenza dies and
a few years later her daughters would immigrate to the
US too. Now Santo, the eldest son, he starts my
particular branch of the family tree. Santo is the grandfather
(22:11):
or great grandfather to all of my relatives that you've
heard so far.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
He held the big reunion one time where all of
the ass the first generation Piazzas were there. It was fantastic.
All my uncles and my dad were playing more which
is the finger game you know, rock stone scissors are
most and they played bacci on a dirt road and
(22:37):
it was a great time. And it's one of the
few times I have memories of seen all Santo's brothers
and sisters.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Santo also had a lot of children, ten of them.
And here the family tree gets even more confusing for
a lot of reasons, namely because everyone seems to have
the same names. There's so many Josette, Giuseppe's, Josephine's, Vetos, Vinnie's,
and then the names they get anglicized when people come
to the US. The Giuseppas become Joe's, the Lorenzo's become Lauras,
(23:11):
the Veto's become Vinnie's. You get the picture. Santo at
some point lived with each of his children, and for
as Sicilian as Santo was, he didn't like to talk
about Italy.
Speaker 5 (23:23):
I remember going there and my old great aunts would
get my face and squeeze it and hurt the hell
out of me and talk.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
An Italian cousin, Sharon, she's my second cousin. I think
I'm bad with the seconds and the thirds. Her mom,
Rose was one of Santo's children.
Speaker 5 (23:42):
Santo was very quiet about his past growing up. I
remember he wouldn't he didn't even want to acknowledge that
he was Italian for a while there, really, but yeah, yeah,
it was very strange. Somebody would come to the door
and see that he was clearly a with is you know,
deep accent, and he'd say, you're in America. Speak you
(24:05):
speak English? No Italian. I mean, he didn't want it
was strange. He was very close mouthed about much of
his younger life, very close, so it's worth investigating and
looking into.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Santo definitely didn't talk about what happened to his mother, Lorenza.
Speaker 6 (24:26):
Your dad knew the most.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
I think, didn't I know?
Speaker 1 (24:30):
But John, my dad and his siblings and cousins are
the complete opposite. They're obsessed with their Sicilian roots. Santo
was first generation. He wanted to hide being Sicilian so
he could fit in in this country, which for some
immigrants was a pretty common reaction. My dad, on the
(24:52):
other hand, he used to say things like capiche instead
of understand, or matzao instead of mozzarella. Pitch you this
Sicily nineteen twelve so that everyone would know he was Italian.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
Everything from Sicily means something.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
My dad loved to pretend to be this kind of
tony soprano tough guy, especially with my high school boyfriends.
Sorry Kurtziegel, not with this Sicilian thing that's been going
on for two thousand years. In the early two thousands,
my dad started to get really sick with a rare
form of muscular dystrophe. But instead of saying housebound or
(25:33):
just feeling sorry for himself, in bed. Lorenzo's story became
this kind of unfinished business, and it seemed to light
a fire in him. He started researching genealogy and taking
trips to Sicily. By that time he had to use
a cane and a walker to get around, and his
(25:53):
obsession had gone into overdrive. It's like falling in love
with Sicily and with learning new things about his family
gave him this way to escape his broken body. He
did some crazy stuff too. He started he got this
hair brained idea to start importing Sicilian organic olive oil,
(26:14):
and he bought a shit ton of it. I think
he blew probably about one hundred grand on local Sicilian
olive oil. And then there was something wrong with the
caps and the labels and they leaked, and it just
sat in our garage for years and years, and he
just pissed away all of his remaining money on this
(26:34):
business that would never exist. But that was yet another
way to keep him going.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Back to Sicily.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
As he got sicker and less mobile, my dad could
still sit at a computer making calls and researching his
leads on Lorenzo's murder. At the time, I found all
of it a little bit silly. I was so disinterested
in this. And if you think about two thousand in college,
I was twenty years old, graduate, I moved to New York.
(27:04):
I'm not living with my parents. I could care less
about my dad's obsession with Cecily. I'm like, that seems
like a nice hobby for you, Dad, I'm happy for you.
But we never talked about it, and now I really
wish that we had. Like now, I really wish that
I'd paid more attention and I'd listened to the things
that he was finding out, because so much of it
is also just now gone. I can't find anything in
(27:27):
his email, I can't Facebook won't let me into his
Facebook account. So a lot of what he learned died
with him. A lot of parts of him are gone,
and he would hate that. He wanted to know the
answer to this mystery. And I wish that I'd been
there to help him, but I was on my own journey,
(27:50):
searching for a life partner, falling in love, getting married,
getting pregnant, and then he was gone. I never properly
agree for him at the time, and it's just been
hitting me now his legacy and what he left unfinished,
(28:10):
And now I feel like I owe him something by
finishing what he started. And why do you think you
care about it? Is it really like to do this
(28:32):
thing for your dad? Do you feel that you have
the same motivation he did or I think my motivation
is different than dad's. There's a part of me that
wants to do this because he didn't get to finish it,
And there's another part of me that wants to do
it because I feel like this woman's real story deserves
to be told, like for people to really know the
(28:54):
truth about what happened to her instead of just becoming
a character in everybody else's life. Lorenzo Marsala was born
in this village called Caltabolota, had a bunch of kids,
and died there at age fifty four. That's pretty much
all we know of her life. When she died, it
was nineteen sixteen. She still had two young daughters at home.
(29:19):
The First World War had just broken out. Now that
I'm a wife and a mother of three children, thank god,
it's not seven, her story just hits different. I'm getting
closer to Lorenza's age every year, and I can't stop
thinking about our family story. From her perspective, how did
(29:42):
she feel about being left behind by her husband for
more than a decade. Did she miss him or was
it liberating to finally not just be someone's wife, to
finally not be getting pregnant almost every single year.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Did she feel safe.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
In her own village? Was it okay because she had
a lot of her family members around her, or maybe
she was in constant danger in this village surrounded by
mafia bandits.
Speaker 6 (30:11):
I was asking somebody about her, and they just looked
at me and they kept saying morte, morte no, and
they're like they shut it down. They wouldn't talk.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Really, you just said the name. You're like Lorenzo Marsala Piazza,
and they.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Were like interesting.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Over the years, many of the Piazzas have gone back
to Sicily looking for answers about our family's past, and
a lot of them have returned with stories of dead
ends and also unsettling experiences that happened when they tried
to find out more about Lorenza.
Speaker 7 (30:50):
They knew they knew about it, right, we did.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
My uncle Jimmy claims that when he was in call,
a bunch of police officers warned him off this case.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
He said, you'd never drop it, not in any tripling
matter whatsoever. But just just as a matter of the
you don't want to start it off, you know, you
don't want the vendetta to continue.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
And if the warnings from the cops weren't enough, they
also got a sign from above.
Speaker 4 (31:23):
When we were there.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
We were at the church.
Speaker 6 (31:26):
Lightning struck the church. Okay, we were actually yeah, we
were in the church where they got married, and lightning
struck the steeple and I.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Want in it.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
While we were yeah, while we were out. Yeah, while
we were in the church. We were in with the
priest going through the records right in the in the rectory,
and lightning struck the top of the church. We had
to get out. Wow, my sister and Lisa, that is
a sign, get us out of here.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I'm starting to think that maybe my family doesn't want
to know what really happened. They're pretty attached to the
stories that they've been telling themselves for all these years.
Well that's interesting because I wonder how people will feel
like if we actually get to like a truth, will.
Speaker 7 (32:21):
It be disappointing or satisfying or you know, I.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Don't know if my family wants to know the actual truth.
That's the interesting thing. Like for as much as people
have come back here and tried to like dig up
more information, I think if the truth ended up being
less interesting than their story, I don't think they're going
to change their story. I think they're going to continue
(32:49):
to tell the story the way they want to tell
the story. But I need to know. I have to
solve this mystery. I don't know if it's for me,
or for my dad or for Lorenza, but I have
to solve it.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
So here I go.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
I'm looking for long lost relatives. I'm digging through archives
covered in dust and trying to trace back a family
history that's been twisted by secrets, omissions, and vengeance. I
can't do all of this from my desk in Philadelphia.
I've got to go back back to, as my dad
(33:23):
liked to call it, the Motherland. I've got to go
to Sicily, to the village of Caltabalota, where all of
this happened in the first place, back to where Lorenzo
was born, and maybe just maybe back to the very
spot where she was murdered.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Aside, there's a landslide. This is a place we have
the absolutely certainty one hundred and.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Ten honestly, a picture when she died.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
We don't have a picture of that. Actually, have you
got to see a video? Videos didn't exist.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I'm bringing all of you on my I'm her vacation
with my husband, three kids under the age of seven.
Everyone is coming to Sicily with me to solve this
one hundred year old murder. Now, I think it's pretty
clear that something bad did happen to her.
Speaker 7 (34:13):
Your father had his story that she was like the
witch doctor.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Could Lorenzo have been killed by the mafia for being
a witch?
Speaker 4 (34:23):
So I'm wondering, how is the story similar or different
than what you got? So I heard two stories. One
story is over land and the other story is that
she was a witch. Well that's even more interesting.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
That's all coming up on the Sicilian Inheritance.
Speaker 6 (34:42):
I'd love to know what the hell happened. Wouldn't it
be great to solve this mystery.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
I feel good my Sicilian witchy powers.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
I feel like we're on the right path.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
The Sicilian Inheritance is a Kaleidoscope reduction in partnership with
iHeart Podcasts. The series is produced by Jenkinney, Kate Osborne,
Dara Potts, and me Joe Piazza, with key help from
Laura Lee Watson of Digging Up Your Roots in the
Boot and Chiro Grillow of Sicily Roots. Many thanks to
Julia Paravaccini and the ancestry dot com research department. You
(35:22):
can get your copy of The Sicilian Inheritance the novel
right now at Truly anywhere that you get your books.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Anywhere you get your books.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
It's got the same name as the podcast, but with
more food, wine and secks. 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, Mangash, Hettikador, Costas Lino's
(35:56):
and Oz Wolloshan from iHeart executive producers are Trina Norvelle
and Nikki Etour. We also want to thank Will Pearson,
connel Byrne, Bob Pittman, and John Mary Napolis
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