Hey Bessies, Hello Sunshine. Today we're diving into a tale that's as gripping as the best true crime mysteries. Imagine uncovering family secrets so intriguing they lead you on a journey all the way to Italy to figure them out. We're thrilled to chat with best selling author, podcaster and journalist Joe Piazza, who did just that to unravel her grandmother's mysterious death. Stay tuned for an unforgettable conversation. It's Tuesday, July sixteenth.
I'm Danielle Robe, I'm Simone Boys, and this is the right side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, laugh, learn and brighten your day.
Stories. Stories. We have such an emphasis on stories, and you know, we all have these family stories that we hear about growing up, whether they're big or small folklore, like I think we hear whispers from our relatives. Did you have that?
Of course?
I think every family does. You know, every family has an interesting story and if you dig deep enough you'll find it.
Well. Our guest today took one of those lures and actually went to Italy. She went to Sicily to explore it. And through this process of exploration brings to life an untold story which we are going to dive deep into. But it really got me thinking about our own family stories. And someone I know, your grandmother was such a force.
Oh, she was such a legend. She was a black woman during the Civil rights era, and she left her mark on her community in a big way. Her name was Bonnie John's and this is my mom, Sheila's mother. And when Bonnie was little, she was so poor, she only had one pair of shoes to wear to school, and all the kids would make fun of her. I grew up hearing this story over and over again, and the moral of the story was that her education was
her way out of that poverty. It was her way to escape that and so she just invested all in in her education. And later in life, she actually ran for public office won a seat on the school board in Maryland during this seven She was the only black school board member during integration, and she fought tirelessly for black students to have access to the same quality of education as their white peers. And to this day, there is a building named after my grandmother, Bonnie John's in
my family's community in Maryland. That's so cool. I'd need a photo of you in front of that building.
Oh, that's a great idea. I got to do that.
I just also want to say that I think that those values that your grandmother held like come through you so vibrantly. I see it all the time. My grandmother Roady is eighty eight years old. She lives in Chicago, and in the winters, she lives in Florida. Now. Her family was from Amsterdam, and she grew up during Hitler's Germany, and so her family heard rumblings of all of this, but they thought, oh, it could never come all the way to Holland, it could never make it to Amsterdam.
And it did. She was taken from her home in the middle of the night at five years old. She went on a train to a camp called Vesterborg. My great grandfather was a tailor, and a guy who worked across the street from him, like their whole lives, had to join the Nazi Party. He was forced to. He didn't want to, and he saw one of the kid's names on a list and said, my great aunt Stella was going to go to death camp. And so he tipped my great grandfather off and they paid off the
Nazis to save her life. They stayed at that camp, Investorborg, which was a work camp, not a death camp. And it changed the legacy of my family drastically. And so my grandmother Rody is super active in the Holocaust Museum and she speaks all over the country. It's really pretty amazing to see her in that light, because I see her as like my grandmother that I would go over to her house and see all of her like old trinkets and photos, and she would make every meal for
every holiday. They actually made a VR film about her life last year. The ending scene is all of us in her living room like dining room table, and there's over twenty of us and it ends with the idea that Hitler tried to wipe all these people out, and look what she has built and the legacy that she has really built for our family. And so that story, similar to what you said, Simone, like just permeated my childhood.
And I think when you grow up, regardless of what that story is, whether it's your own grandmother or somebody else, it really sort of dictates your values the direction of your life. And so I think today is going to be really powerful because there's this matriarchal figure in our guest, Joe's life who was life changing.
Well in the same way that you revisited the sites that meant so much to your family, Danielle, our guest today retrace the footsteps of a larger than life matriarch in her family story to uncover the truth about her great great grandmother's mysterious death. So Joe Piazza is a best selling author, podcast host, and investigator of not just
her family stories, but other women's stories as well. She's written multiple books, including Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, and she also hosted Under the Influence, which is this really fascinating podcast that dives into the business of social media mom influencers.
She also had this article in l which is how I first found her writing, and it's all about how she gave herself her own engagement rank. So regardless of your marital status, please go check that out. And her latest project, The Sicilian Inheritance, is inspired by the story of Lorenza Marsala, her great great grandmother and Joe's dad became absolutely obsessed with piecing together what really happened in
her mysterious death. So after he died, Joe came across an old email from him filled with information about Lorenza, and that's when she decided to dig into the mystery really on his behalf.
And through this investigation, she's bringing a Jens Old story to life. And she's here with us on the show today. We are in for a wild ride. Welcome to the bright Side.
Joe.
Hello, thank you so much for having me.
You have such a quintessential Italian name, so it's fun to say Piazza, especially for what we're about to talk about today.
Oh my god, totally, totally, and I really love the enthusiasm that you've said it with. Just like Piazza. But I mean, like as as everyone knows, like Piazza just means like town square in Italy. So when you say Piazza there, they're like, yeah, I know, we're here. We're just standing here in front of the city Hall. Yeah.
We are going to talk all about you and your work, Joe. I mean, you've centered women in the stories that you tell as an author. You recently published a book and podcast about an ancestor of yours, which we are going to get into. You've also reported on influencer culture in the show Under the Influence. You've also covered Laura Ingalls Wilder and the show Wilder. What makes something a Joe Piazza story.
Oh my gosh, that's a question that my agents are constantly asking me. They're like, what's your lane? Girlfriend? And I mean, I actually love the way that you just framed it, because, to be honest, I've been a journalist for twenty three years now, I've been writing books for about thirteen years, and if there's one through line through it all, it's, you know, women's stories that haven't been told before, brave and badass women's stories that I think
deserve to be told. And that doesn't always fit neatly into a genre. It's not just like mystery thriller or you know, spicy romance, although you know, I like to write about all those things too, within the context of badass women. But those are the stories that have always gotten me excited. For most of human history, we've seen men writing history, and so to be able to tell the stories of women really feels like such an honor.
And I also I call myself a storyteller now more than I do a journalist or an author, even though I do both of those things. Because I think different stories want to be told in different genres, and my biggest goal is to meet the audience where they're at with a particular story. So I'm like, oh, okay, is this going to be great in a podcast? Awesome, Let's do this in audio. Is this going to be good
for a short, fun sub stack? Okay? Great? That is just as valid as like a novel with a big publishing house to.
Me, if I may add, I also think that you take a traditional narrative and you flip it on its head, because you've done that so many different times. One of the reasons I found you originally was you wrote an article in l called why I bought myself an engagement ring? And that's taking this traditional idea and flipping it on its head, and you always have such a feminist perspective.
I love that story and it's funny. I mean, I wrote that almost ten years ago, because I've been married almost ten years and I wrote it right before I got married, and I bought you fling. I know, I know, right, I bought that ring in a Tanzania, And I just love the idea of flipping that narrative, right, Like, why as women do we have to wait for men to buy us this thing, like we need that to move on to the next stage of our lives. That seemed ridiculous to me. And by the way, I'm not acting
all high and mighty. It only seemed ridiculous after like years of bemoaning why I was the last one of my single friends. Okay, so like I went through all of the crap, bought myself an engagement ring, and then essentially just conjured my fiance on a boat in the Galapagos three months later.
I also see you as a bit of a cultural anthropologist, because it seems like there is no territory or era that goes untouched for you, Like you follow your curiosity. If there's an interesting, badass woman who is flipping the script, you're going to find her and you're going to cover her. What have you discovered about womanhood through each of these stories?
You know that we are just so much stronger and braver than anyone ever gives women credit for, and that it has been women holding society together at the seams pretty much since the beginning of society. But it's always
their stories that haven't been told. My favorite nonfiction book is a little book I wrote called If Nuns Ruled the World, and it's ten stories of bad ass feminist nuns who I think nuns have been turned into a caricature for so long, when really it was a way to escape the feminist tropes of getting married and being forced to be a wife and a mother. These women
could continue getting their education. They were running colleges, they were running hospitals, they were running entire communities and taking care of the sick and running the economies of these small villages, especially when so many men were constantly leaving and going off to wars in Europe, right, no one ever recognized the nuns. In fact, when I talk to them, you know, they say, we've really we haven't just been
written out of history. We've been mocked throughout history, because the easiest way to take away someone's power is to mock them. And so I think that's one of the best examples of a narrative that just has been buried in history, of powerful, strong women that the world doesn't want to think about.
I love that you also said women that they don't want to think about, Yeah, because that really is the case. I cite this statistic all the time because I find it just wild. But zero point five percent of recorded history is made up of women's stories. And there are so many women's stories to share, they just haven't been told, haven't been shared, haven't been recorded.
Or they have been but then they get lost, they get buried because not only is it not women writing down history so often recording history, but it hasn't been the women archiving history. And so when you think about the people responsible for maintaining records, it has typically been men, you know, male bureaucrats, male archivists keeping track of things, as opposed to women. So it's not just that we haven't been writing it, it's that we haven't been the keepers of history.
Joe, we have to take another short break, but we'll be back in just a minute. Don't go anywhere, and we're back with Joe Piazza. So your book and your podcast, your newest one is The Sicilian Inheritance, and it looks at the suspicious death of one of your ancestors more than one hundred years ago. And we live in a true crime obsessed culture, but this is sort of like a true crime story in your own family. So for anyone who hasn't listened yet, can you set up the
story for all of us. Who is Lorenza Marsala?
Yes, also, isn't that name so good? If my husband weren't already fixed, I would have another baby and name her Lorenza Marsala. Lorenza Marsala is my great great grandmother on my dad's side from Sicily. And you know, for my whole life, I've been hearing this story about how she was the family matriarch and how her husband Antonino
came here to America. All of her sons came here, they came to make their fortune, left her behind in Sicily, and she was murdered in Sicily before she could join them. And my family has a couple of different theories about this. The men all think that it was it was the mafia that killed her, because they all seem to think
that they're Tony Soprano. And the women all think that she was killed because she was a witch and a healer, because all of my female ancestors think that they're Sicilian witches, and they're probably right, they really are. But you know, it was one of those family stories that just kind of gets told in passing. You know, it's like a mythology and a lot of my relatives didn't even know her real name. They're like, just you know, my great grandmother,
my great great grandmother. I've been fascinated by it for a long time, and so I started writing a fictional novel called The Sicilian Inheritance, loosely based on Lorenzo's story. I didn't want to know the real story at that time, because I was really intently writing during the pandemic, and I wanted to have an adventure, and I wanted to write the adventure that I knew we all wanted to have.
I wanted to transport us to Sicily and also to time this uniquely feminist time in Sicilian history, which I discovered when I started doing research about the time period, when you know, hundreds of thousands of men left Sicily to come to America. Many of the towns were left to the women and the children, and the women took the men's jobs, and they started buying and selling land under their own names and lending money, and they had power, like real power for the first time in their lives.
And it was this unique feminist moment in Sicilian history that I had certainly never heard about, that I had not seen written about a lot in pop culture that appears in academic papers, but nowhere for a real mass audience to absorb it. And so that's what I really wanted to focus on in this book, a modern day woman going back to unravel this mystery and discovering this feminist time in Sicilian history, you know, laced with romance, an adventure, and the most delicious food that you've ever
read about. But then when I finished the book, I started thinking, well, I would be doing a disservice to her and also to all of the women like Lorenza if I didn't actually try to solve her murder in real life. My husband thought I was joking when I was like, we should go to Sicily this summer and solve this murder, And all of a sudden, I bought plane tickets and he's like, I really just thought you had had two tequilas and we're kidding about solving a murder.
And I'm like, oh no, we're going with all three of our children under the age of seven. And so we took our whole family of five to Sicily to start researching this murder. And that turned into the Sicilian Inheritance podcast, which is a true crime adjacent show Unraveling This century Old Murder.
Did you know how to end the book before you started writing it or was the ending something that you discovered in the process.
I love that question because I am not an outliner. I don't outline my books at all. I sit down and I literally fly by the seat of my pants. Other writers apparently call this being a pantser, which I only recently discovered, and when I heard it, I was like, pantser meant something so different when I was in junior high. But okay, yeah, sure, I'm a pants I fly by the stat of my pants. The only thing I knew without revealing anything is the twist that happens at the
end of the book. I knew that was going to happen, and I knew it was going to be a banger, but I didn't know how we were going to get there, and so everything else just kind of came to me
along the way. And it's been really interesting because I did so much research about Sicily for the novel, but didn't research Lorenzo's actual story while writing the book, because, like I said, I wanted to be able for it to be fiction, for the characters to develop, but after I finished the book, it was turned in, it went to copy editing. I mean, it was essentially printed and ready to go to stores when I was investigating the real murder. There were so many similarities that it is
now completely eerie. And at one point during the podcast,
I actually interview a medium, Marianne DeMarco. She's a Sicilian American who lives on Long Island, because apparently all on Long Island, and so she said something, and I'm not a wo wou person, but she was like, I can feel all of these Sicilian women, not just her ancestors, but these women whose stories haven't been told, and they've just been nudging you along as you've been working on this book and feeding you information and feeding you stories,
and same with the podcast, and just little nuggets of information. And I really felt it along the way, like there were some things that I wrote that I could not have known were true, that were true. And I still get chills when I'm thinking about it now. But yeah, because I do think that those women wanted their stories told.
Can you give us one example of that?
Oh?
My god, so many? Okay, So one of my favorite ones is this character appears in the book She's a hotel owner who lives in this tiny village called Caltabalessa in the book, which is based on my family's village of Culta Balota. So there's a woman who owns a hotel and her name is just A and it's Juicy for sure. Now, I had no idea that Justesseppina was even a name all right, much less that Juicy was
the nickname for that name. I was like, it was kind of a placeholder, right, Like I knew Giuseppe was a name, and I knew that they feminized a lot of names, but I'm like, God, this sounds fun. And I also like the nickname Juicy really fits her. She's like this bold brush woman who's like taking control of everything. And I just kept it and kept it and it
never changed it. And then I eventually found out it is the most common name in the town where my family is from for women, and Juicy is indeed the nickname. And when I was there in March of this year and I was in the cemetery, it's like every other grave was a Jusppoina, which was so interesting, Like these are just things that like kind of got to me along the way, And I don't know. I don't know where they came from. I really don't.
So I want to tap into that a little bit because the psychic experience is my favorite aspect of this story. The psychic that you spoke to gave you an incredible term for Lorenza, and she called her a strong mouthed woman. How did this story change your perspective on your family's matriarch and what have you seen passed down through generations from her now that you know her better.
Yeah. You know, when I first heard the story of her being killed back in Sicily, you know, I didn't picture her the way that she actually looks, And I think I had this like very cultural stereotype of like, you know, a Sicilian grandma. She's at the stove and she's like making your sauce, and she's like making your meatballs. I mean, none of which could I mean, it just couldn't be further from the truth, when in reality, finally, when I discovered a picture of her, I'm like, oh
my gosh, that woman's eyes could cut glass. Like she looks terrifying and powerful and in control. And the fact that my family didn't know her name, that they didn't know really anything about her is now shocking to me, but it wasn't when I first started. It just seemed kind of normal. But I'm like, why did we passed down this story of her death and nothing about her life.
When I went back through land records, I discovered that she was indeed buying and selling land under her own name, and that maybe she never planned to come to America, and that you know, she lived in this like little area of the village, really close to her sister and close to her close friends. And she's the one that paid for the passage, not just for her husband to go to America, but for each and every one of her sons. Like she was making the money over there.
She was supporting everybody. And you know, there's also some rumors that she was perhaps a money lender and that she crossed the wrong people. I mean, she was a force to be reckoned with. So to hear Mary Anne say she's a strong mouthed woman, I'm like, oh, my gosh, how many other strong mouthed women are there in my family? Like that makes so much sense. We are a family of strong mouthed women, So of course she was. But you know, just the fact that we didn't picture her
like that. Again speaks to how much we lose women's strength and bravery when we're not hearing their stories directly from them.
There's so much familiar pride imbued in this story. I mean, you said that your daughter was a huge inspiration for you. I know that your dad was always fascinated with this lore that's in your family.
What do you think?
And I know that he always wanted to be a journalist and he enjoyed researching her and trying to figure out what happened to her and piecing the story together. What do you think that he would think of the book and the podcast now?
I think about that a lot. My dad loved piecing together family history. He wanted to be a journalist. He wanted to be a writer, and he ended up becoming a claims attorney instead, the opposite of a journalist, really, and he always you know, he pushed me to be
a writer. But he was really, really supportive. And he had really bad muscular dystrophy for the last ten years of his life and couldn't get around as well as he used to, and his whole life really became the computer in a way, and where he could travel around the world through his research. So he did a lot of research on ancestry and trying to reach out to
people on Facebook. And while he was sick, he did make it to Sicily about three or four times, and you know, he did interviews with people in the town. A lot of those have been lost because we lost his computer when he passed away. We couldn't get into anything.
I felt him with me. I mean, again, I sound very woo woo when I say these things, but you know, I genuinely felt him, you know, cheering me on as I was doing this project, and it it really helped me grieve him in a way that I hadn't grieved him before, because when he passed away, I had just gotten married, I just moved across the country, I just lost my job, and I was pregnant with my first baby.
And grieving is impossible when you're in the midst of that many life changes at once, and writing this book and following in his footsteps, and you know, even reading the few emails and messages from him that I had left behind, some to me and some to other people. I mean, I've cried more over his death in the past two years than I did right after he passed away nearly a decade ago, because I was finally able
to get that kind of closure. I feel like I've been in conversation with him while I've been writing this book, and it's been a really beautiful process.
You approached this story with two perspectives. There was one fictional wishes your novel, and then one factual with your podcast. Why did you make that choice?
Because I think that the story begged to be told in two different ways, right, And I'm actually really glad that I did it in this way because they're both going to reach a different audience, and those audiences may end up crossing over, but their paths to them will likely be different. So the Sicilian Inheritance the novel, like I said, it has been packaged as a delicious, adventurous beach read. I mean it's on every summer beach read,
which I love. I'm like, yeah, go pick up the book, read it and by the pool, read it by the beach, read it while you're ignoring your children. I love that. And while I did set out to write this delicious adventure, it has these strong themes of women's agency and women's ambition and women working together to fight against the patriarchy. Do I love the idea of someone picking this up and thinking that they're getting a delicious adventure and then just being like, oh my god, Yes, I would love
to support other women too. Yes, I love these stories of ambitious, badass women. And so I think that you know, by packaging this in an adventure and something that is very easy to consume and read and is fun, I mean, first and foremost, I wanted to write a book that was fun again because I had been reading so many books that were so good but were so dark, and so I'm like, I just want to have fun reading again.
And then, you know, for reporting out the real story, audio completely fun, like the most natural way to do that, because I find audio such an intimate setting. It is the best way to transport someone to another location. And another time, when I knew that I wanted to solve the real life mystery, I was like, oh, yeah, no, we're doing this as a podcast. This is like, this
is definitely definitely the right setting for this. I really wanted to transport us there, to take us I mean, not just across the ocean, but also travel back through time to really really understand Lorenza story.
What do you think Lorenzo would think of Sicilian Inheritance?
I think she'd like it, I really do. I mean, I think, like I said, those women were so I mean not all women, right, Like we can't say a blanket statement all the women in Sily, but like so many of those women were so ambitious and they wanted much more out of their lives than they were allowed to have. And so I think, you know, she would really enjoy getting to read this perhaps alternate ending to
her story. Although I'm not going to ruin the podcast or the book for anyone, and you can listen while you read, because they're not at all parallel. There's no spoilers. But if you get through both of them, the real life ending of the podcast, there may be some crossover with what I imagined in the book, which I think is very very interesting.
Okay, we need to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with author, journalist, and podcaster Joe Piazza. And we're back with Joe Piazza. Joe, what did it mean to you to be Sicilian before you embarked on this journey and what does it mean to you now?
I mean honestly, everything about that has changed, you know, very I was proud of my Sicilian heritage in a very surface kind of way. I was like, I'm proud to come, you know, from these strong people who left a life of poverty to come to America. I didn't know nearly enough about Sicilian history and everything that had happened on that island for the previous three thousand and four thousand years, which was one of the most fun
parts about reporting out this book. I mean, Sicily is an island that has been conquered over and over again, I mean pretty much by every conquering force tangential to the Mediterranean. It's why their food is so good, to be honest. But there are also people that, you know, have had to remain strong in the force of opposition, but also maintain a tight community in the face of opposition,
including the women. And it is a history filled with strong women who held their families together as the island was being plundered over and over again, as the men were being sent away, as the men were being killed, was always the women who held these communities together. And that's what I think about. I mean, that's my biggest takeaway. I'm so proud of being a Sicilian American now in a way that I'm like it was fine before, great, but like now I'm like, oh, my gosh, yes, I'm
getting my first tattoo. Guys, actually, wait, we love this.
So Brooke Baldwin came on and told us about her bad girl era getting tattoos. What is your tattoo?
Gonna say, my gosh, I'm getting my first one at age forty four, and I'm getting the Medusa from the Sicilian flag because we talk about Medusa a little bit in the book, and we talk a lot in the book about how the Greek myths, many of them originated it justly because Sicily was part of Greece, right, And I kind of flipped the narrative of Medusa on its head and say was she a monster? Or was she just sick of men come into her house?
Like?
Was she a badass woman? Who is just like I have had enough and I will not be treated like this. And I love the fact that Medusa is on the Sicilian flag, and so yeah, I'll send everyone pictures when it's done. I'm so excited. I think that I'm doing it on my forearm, but I'm not sure. So we've been drawing practice tattoos on different places in my body and deciding how we feel about it.
Wow, this is a big deal, is we? Meaning you and your husband, me.
And my husband, and also we are we're up here in the cast skills right now, and one of our best friends is an actual artist and a children's book illustrator. And every time I've had like one catchuo, I'm like Steve, and can you draw them a dusa on my arm? And then he does, and then he does. My mom is up here with us, helping us with our kids, and she's sixty nine years old, and I was like, Mom,
I'm gonna get my first tattoo. I just generally felt like she thought tattoos were kind of tacky and she wasn't into them. And she's like, I want a tattoo too, and I'm like what And she's like, I would like Denari's Tigerian's dragon from Game of Thrones, and I'm like, really, tracing Piazza, really like this is who you are right now. So we're getting our tattoos together. Actually as a mother daughter tattoo session.
That's so Special's really exciting.
Actually, this is something that I never would have envisioned for us years. Like I feel a new book coming on.
I feel like this is the start of a new new book, news a podcast.
Yeah, Shoe.
One of the things that I'm hearing from you is that you're sort of leaning into this theme of adventure even now that you're home from Sicily. Is that something that came from this experience in this trip or you've always been like this.
No, I've definitely always been like this, for sure. And I also married someone who was like this right Like I got married when I was thirty five years old. I didn't meet Nick until I was thirty four. We were both journalists, Like I said, we met on a boat in the Galapagos Islands, like I married someone who loved to travel. Our fourth date was in Paris. We got engaged in three months, Like we had this whirlwind romance.
You know, I wanted to be with someone who wanted to have these adventures with me, who wanted to, you know, have these adventures with our children, because even though they're so little and they may not remember the details, I think they'll remember the spirit of it. And that's what I think about all the time. But even though I've always been like this. I wrote this piece for Cosmo about big Sicilian energy, and like I said, I'm now a woman in my mid forties and being in Sicily.
These women are strong mouthed women. They are confident. They are just walking down the beach wearing their bikinis, smoking their cigarettes and gossiping about Antonio over there. And so I'm like, I just I love their confidence and their boldness. And like, while I've always been adventurous, I do feel like I've started to lose some of that confidence, in that boldness, you know, just as I've gotten a little bit older. And that reminded me that there's no reason
to lose any of it. And I feel more confident and comfortable in my body now than I ever have, and more inspired to just be a bold and brash presence in the world. And that is something that I think came from working on this project and being in Sicily so many times.
Well, I think you've always been a strong mouthed woman, and maybe now you just have a term for it. So thank you for sharing all those strong words with us today. We really appreciate your time.
Thank you, Joe, I love it. This was so much fun. Guys, I could talk to you forever. Oh same, thank you.
You're gonna have to come back.
Joe Piazza is an author, journalist, and podcaster. You can listen to our latest podcast, The Sicilian Inheritance, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, celebrity fitness trainer Jeanette Jenkins is here to talk health and fitness for another iteration of Wellness Wednesday. Listen and Follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Simone Boye.
You can find me at Simone Voice on Instagram and.
Tiktok'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's ro v Ay.
See you tomorrow, folks.
Keep looking on the bright side.