🇮🇹 "The Sicilian Inheritance" - by Jo Piazza
A woman's journey to Sicily uncovers family secrets, leading her on a captivating quest through generations of mystery and empowerment.
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In this week's edition, you will read an exclusive excerpt of
’s latest novel The Sicilian Inheritance.If this is your first time here, we have an eclectic collection of previously featured novels that you can find here.
Have fun reading! ✨
📚 The Stats
After her business and marriage crumble, Sara Marsala is left adrift, mourning the loss of her great-aunt Rosie.
Rosie's passing leads Sara to Sicily, where she inherits a ticket, land deed, and a shocking family secret: her great-grandmother Serafina may have been murdered.
Sara embarks on a journey through Italy, unraveling Serafina's story of resilience in the face of danger. As she delves deeper, Sara confronts the same menacing forces that threatened her ancestor, weaving together a tale of mystery and empowerment.
The Sicilian Inheritance is a riveting narrative celebrating the strength of women across generations.
🖋️ Quote from the Book:
There were more words in that tiny room than I had seen in my entire life, and I felt compelled to be close to them, to run my fingers along the spines of the volumes.
📖 Chapter 1:
Reading time: 14 minutes
Sara
Viewed from above, the shapely boot of Italy appears to be kicking the island of Sicily into the tumultuous crease between the Mediterranean and Tyrrhenian Seas. The color of the water beneath us shifted and swirled from light blue to navy to an emerald green. Our plane nearly grazed the severe cliffs lining the shore as we swooped above the burnt orange rooftops of Palermo.
It was gorgeous and otherworldly and still I thought, for maybe the hundredth time since I took off from Philadelphia, What the hell am I doing?
“It’s an adventure, baby girl.” I heard Rosie so clearly that my eyes watered. The fact that I didn’t make this trip with her when she was alive weighed me down and yet it still felt like she was right there with me.
A painfully young and striking Italian flight attendant made me put the box with Rosie’s ashes in it in the overhead compartment before we landed. Until then I’d had it in my lap. I imagined it warming my thighs even though that was impossible. It was just a box.
Rosie’s last voice memo to me on the day before she died played on repeat in my mind.
Buck up. Get your ass out of bed and seize the goddamn day.
I hoped that she had managed to seize her last goddamn day.
“Do you think she was losing it?” Carla asked when I told her about what Aunt Rosie wanted me to do here in Sicily, about the all-expenses-paid trip, about the deed for land that might or might not be worth anything. “Did she have dementia at the end that we didn’t know about?”
“She was sharp as a knife.”
“You sure? Everyone sort of loses it when they’re that old,” Carla said.
“I’m totally sure she hadn’t lost it.”
“I wish I was going with you. I mean it’s not like she bought me a plane ticket or anything, but I wish I could have gotten out of work to come even if I had to pay my own way.”
“I know,” I said. “And Rosie probably knew you had a big case going on, plus the kids.” I lied to assuage my sister’s quiet jealousy. We both knew I was Rosie’s favorite and most of the time it never bothered Carla because she had been everyone else’s favorite for our entire lives. She was bouncy, sparkly, and liquid magic. In addition to everything that made Carla so outwardly lovely, she also made you feel like the most captivating person in the room and that made her the truly captivating one. Things just worked for her while I struggled for everything. I never resented her though; her charm worked on me most of all. Rosie had understood from the very start that I needed one person to love me a little bit more than they loved my sister.
But Carla still felt the need to add, “Also she knew you needed cash. And that getting away would be good for you. This was like her final way of taking care of you. You’ve hardly changed your clothes for the past two weeks.”
“That’s not true.” It was true.
“So do what the letter says. Go to Sicily. Figure out if this deed is real or not. It’s probably not, but whatever,” Carla said. “Have sex with some hunky Italian men who don’t speak a word of English. Eat good food and drink all the wine, eat and pray and love and all that shit, and then come back and put your life back together.”
In that moment we both pretended like food and sex could be the answer to what had broken me instead of therapy, pharmaceuticals, and a time machine. I promised her I would try my best.
The pilot announced something so fast it was impossible for me to understand despite the fact that I’ve managed to retain a decent proficiency from the Italian classes Rosie enrolled me in as a child. She paid for them for all her grandnieces and grandnephews starting in elementary school. It was so important to her that we embrace our heritage. Rosie’s father, Giovanni, spoke only Italian at home and she remained fluent until the day she died. All my cousins dropped out after a year. I was the only one who kept it up, spending Saturday mornings in the smoke-filled basement of Saint Rita’s down by the baseball stadium for more than a decade. Even though Rosie’s Italian was speckled with her father’s Sicilian dialect and mine was more basic, the two of us used it as our secret language to talk shit about everybody else at family gatherings.
On the way to get my bags, I tried to call Jack to say good morning to Sophie, completely forgetting the time difference and getting his voicemail. I recorded a quick video message for my daughter instead, making funny faces and pantomiming eating a lot of pizza, her favorite food.
Since I’d moved out of our house six months ago, I’d been busting my ass to keep the restaurant alive. We began offering delivery service for the first time. Came up with a scheme to curate customized meat boxes every month. We stayed open for more hours. None of it was enough to make payroll and rent and health insurance. But I still made it over to the house every morning to take Soph to day care. Then I picked her up most days and brought her to the restaurant while I prepped the dinner service. I tried to give everything to both my babies, Sophie and La Macellaia, but I was running on empty all the time and it wasn’t enough for either of them.
I had thought Jack and I were still figuring the arrangements out, figuring us out. I didn’t expect him to hire a lawyer to officially file for divorce and full-time custody of our daughter, but he did, a month ago. I’d been trying to hire my own legal team to fight back ever since, no easy task when you have no cash or credit for the hefty deposit they all required.
The second I made it out of customs I ran into a meatball-shaped man hoisting a sign with my name above his head like I was someone who mattered.
“Sara Marsala. Buongiorno. Come stai? Spero tutto bene.” I translated in my head. Good morning. How are you? I hope all is well.
The meatball kissed both of my cheeks like we were old friends and switched to a heavily accented English.
“I am so sorry for the loss of Rosie. Such a woman! A good friend. A compadre.”
His intimacy surprised me. “You knew Rosie?”
“Of course, I knew Rosie. We spoke many times on the computer and the WhatsApp. Many times. She was looking for a driver for you, but she got a friend in me.” He pounded on his chest like a proud ape.
I wanted to interrogate him, to know everything they talked about, what saucy jokes she served up, whether she flirted with him the way she did with gas station attendants, bank tellers, and supermarket cashiers, whether she told him all the things she never got to tell me.
“Rosie is the best.” He said it like an indisputable fact.
“She is.” I managed. “She was.”
“Let me feed you. She would want me to feed you.” Before I knew it, he’d led me by the elbow to a small outdoor café just past the taxi line. He introduced himself properly while we walked. “I am Pippo.” It was pronounced Peep-poh. He drilled down hard on the last syllable like it was a surprise, a puppet jumping out of a jack-in-the-box. Pippo abandoned me at an unsteady table for two and quickly returned with a tiny paper cup of espresso and a soft sugary donut the size of a baby’s head.
“Ciambella!” He announced the name of the pastry like he was presenting me with an Oscar.
I could almost see my reflection in the pastry’s thick sheen of butter before I devoured it in seconds For the past couple of months nothing tasted good. In fact, almost everything I put in my mouth since I learned I’d have to close the restaurant tasted like cardboard. Eating, once my greatest joy, turned into the most mundane activity of my day. The ciambella was the first time in a long time that I actually derived pleasure from something.
“Your aunt was very proud of you. She sent me this.”
He reached into his bag and I knew what he was gonna pull out before he showed me.
“You are famous in America. The queen of meat!”
The Philadelphia magazine cover with my face on it was a printout from last year’s July issue when La Macellaiawon an award for the best steak house in Philly. The photographer for the piece, a hawk-nosed twentysomething in thick glasses and a polka-dot dress that smelled like an old lady’s closet, asked me to grab the biggest knife I could find. On the cover I’m brandishing a massive meat cleaver over a pearly pink pig belly ready to coax a coppa steak out of an obstinate pork shoulder. Given the state of world affairs, a lot of people saw a picture like that and created a story about empowerment and agency and how the future really was female. Others hated it, particularly the establishment chefs who thought I only got recognized because I was a woman.
Serafina, 1908
The girl is cursed. My mother whispered this to my father late at night, even though she knew I could hear her through our paper-thin walls. Mamma sensed I’d been wicked, that I’d brought shame on our family, but all she muttered was the girl is cursed like what was happening to me was all the result of the devil’s magic.
Before the sun rose the next morning Cettina and I visited la strega, the witch, to try to undo the terrible thing I had done.
The old woman lived beyond the end of the road, around the steep curve of the hillside, past where the stone path turned to gravel and then to dirt. My skin tingled with the uncomfortable feeling I’d been tricked, like maybe Liuni and Gio would jump out from behind a tree and laugh at us for believing in fairy tales.
Sheep bells chimed in the distance calling us back home. Cettina, my oldest friend, the closest thing I had to a sister, led the way, gripping my hand so hard my bones ached. Earth came loose beneath her naked feet—she never wore shoes if she could help it, not even to mass. When we were little, she would release a hellish scream when her mother tried to stuff her chubby toes into a pair of shiny slippers for Sunday services. I could hear it from our house all the way down the street where I was placing my own tiny feet into church shoes, proving to my mamma that I was a good girl.
Visiting the witch, asking her for help, had been Cettina’s idea. The strega was a distant relative of hers, one her family never talked about. No one with half a mind would admit to being the witch’s kin even though every woman in town depended on her healing powers for something or other. I didn’t know if the witch chose to keep away from the whispers and stares from our villagers or whether she was asked to live just beyond the town’s border to keep her magic separate from the sacred sphere of the church. Most likely a combination of both. But Cettina cared for the old woman. My friend had a beautiful heart—bigger, perhaps, than was good for her—so she’d sneak away once a week to the woman’s cottage on the edge of the cliff, bringing things the witch needed from town—flour, lye soap, sugar, copies of Il Giornale di Sicilia.
“She can read?” I’d asked.
“I think she learned in Palermo,” Cettina said.
Palermo, the capital, might as well have been on a distant star for how far away it seemed. That the witch had once lived in the big city and chose to return to our dusty rural village of peasants only added to her mythology.
Cettina added. “I have seen her reading long books and articles.”
None of the old women in town could read. Even many of the girls our age didn’t know how to decipher more than simple sentences. Some of them, including Cettina, had quit school long ago to help their mammas raise little ones. The state only required children to attend school for four years. At fifteen, I was the only girl left in our class, a fact that my own mamma often complained about because she wanted more help at home. My love of learning made no sense to her. It was impractical at best and dangerous at worst. I hadn’t told my mother that I was at the top of all of the students in my class, one of two who would be sent down to the upper school in the city of Sciacca to receive more education. A girl from our town had never done it before. My teacher was going to ask for special permission to send me. One day I could maybe even get my teaching certificate, become a maestrina. I’d asked Papa months ago, and he’d been skeptical, but my desperate enthusiasm won him over and he promised to try to convince my mamma.
It was the only thing I had ever truly desired. It was the only thing that could offer an escape from our tiny village. I was born in Caltabellessa and had never left it. Generations of women before me had lived their entire lives just circling the tip of the small mountain caring for babies and husbands. For me that life seemed the worst kind of prison. But leaving would be impossible if the witch couldn’t help me.
It was on Cettina’s most recent trip to take the witch her supplies and papers that she had explained my situation. Cettina knew what the witch could do because she had the ears of a wild boar and had listened as her mamma’s friends discussed la strega’s work, her spells, her healing. We had not had a midwife in town for many years, not since old Nunzia followed her sons to La Mérica. The physician, Peppe Spica, lived far away in a bigger village and did little to treat women’s troubles. It was said that la strega could deliver a baby without pain to the mother, an act that was an insult to God since the bible insisted women deserved pain in childbearing in penance for the sins of the first woman. Cettina had also heard that the witch had medicine that could solve my particular problem.
“What if it does not work?” I asked as we neared the witch’s home.
“It will,” my friend promised. “I will be here to help. I will take care of you,” Cettina’s voice was brave with conviction.
Our village grew smaller and smaller behind us. If we turned to the right and walked a few paces or two from the path we’d tumble off the edge into the valley below, a deep crevice filled with thorns and gnarled olive trees too tough and old to bear food.
I thought to turn back right when the witch’s house came into view, as if my doubts willed it to appear. The structure was built directly into the mountain, not unlike the dragon’s ear, but with a crooked door and two small windows on either side. A century ago this building used to be a stall for the militia to look out for invaders coming in from the sea. The windows were just big enough for arrows to fly out. Men would live inside the mountain for months at a time, keeping one female goat for milk which they slaughtered for meat before they went home to their families. Most of these places were abandoned now, but the witch had moved here because she had no family that wanted to claim her, no husband, and nowhere else to be.
Or so the stories went.