PHILADELPHIA — Jo Piazza grew up hearing that her great-great-grandmother was murdered.
The rest of the story varied — all her relatives told a different version: Some said Lorenza Marsala was a witch and the people of her Sicilian village turned on her, while others said she was a midwife and a baby died under her care. Another version went that she owned land that the mafia wanted.
The only constant was that she was killed in 1916, before she could come to America to be with her husband and children.
Piazza, a reporter and novelist who grew up in Bucks Count, Pa., and now lives in Philadelphia, found herself reflecting more and more on the family legend.
“What would it be like to be a mother left alone in Sicily — you have no rights, you’re barely educated — while your husband goes to seek his fortune in America?” she wondered.
That question formed the basis of her forthcoming novel, “The Sicilian Inheritance,” a fictionalization of her great-great-grandmother’s life and death. The novel has dual timelines, following the matriarch of an Italian family in the early 1900s and a present-day Philly woman whose business is floundering. Piazza, a veteran podcaster and coauthor of the bestselling novel “We Are Not Like Them,” among others, wrote much of it at Philadelphia’s Fitler Club. She said it is her “most Philly book yet.”
“I wrote all of it while I was living here and just let the city inspire all of the dialogue and slightly edgy personality of the book,” she said.
While writing the novel, she didn’t want to know too many historical details. But after finishing it, Piazza was desperate to get to the root of the real-life family mystery. Her father had been obsessed with learning the truth about what happened to Marsala, but he died before he was able to figure it out. Piazza “started to take over the obsession,” she said.
Over the past year, she dove into the history, poring over census records, ship manifests, and naturalization records, piecing together Marsala and her relatives’ lives from Philadelphia. She hired a genealogy researcher in Sicily and traveled there to search handwritten police and land records. She described her first reporting trip there as “White Lotus meets Only Murders in the Building, with me and my three kids under the age of seven blundering our way through Sicily” — along with a podcast producer.
Piazza declined to share any spoilers, but the result of her deep dive is a companion to the novel, a nonfiction podcast also called The Sicilian Inheritance, in which Piazza sets out to untangle what she calls “a 100-year game of telephone.” The first two episodes were released when the book came out earlier this month.
Piazza just returned from a weeklong reporting trip to Sicily, where she finally got access to the homicide and mafia archival records from the time of her great-great-grandmother’s death. She spent days examining the ancient files.
“For so long, we just knew about her death,” she said. “Now I feel like I have a very full picture of how she lived her life — as this brave and independent woman who was on her own.”
