00:16:40.480My family's prevailing theory of Lorenza's death has always been that she was killed over a land dispute, that the so-called Black Hand murdered her for her property, or maybe, maybe that she sold some land and was killed over the money.
00:16:57.600But through his trips, my dad arrived at an alternate theory.
00:17:01.680And I don't know exactly what he found out or how,
00:17:06.340but he came back from Sicily convinced that it might not have been about the land.
00:17:13.020That the murder actually had to do with Lorenza being a healer of some kind.
00:17:19.320And she was like, you know, in the past, in this small village,
00:17:25.260There were some women doing, I don't know, in English their name.
00:17:33.280But, you know, it was a mix between magic, ritual, but also practical things that really can help, especially babies.0.92
00:17:47.580My dad used the words witch and healer almost interchangeably.
00:17:51.820Now, witch is a very particular word, and it has been used all over the world to cut down women who do things to help other women.
00:18:02.900And of course, calling a woman a witch has been an age-old excuse to murder her.
00:18:08.320In Sicily, there's another word, strega, which encompasses healer, apothecary, midwife, some other quote-unquote witchy things.
00:18:19.360Because let's not forget, organized health care is a rather modern luxury.0.50
00:18:25.580In rural areas, like most of Sicily, these women were often the health care providers.0.91
00:18:32.000I remember when I was a kid, now I am 66.
00:18:36.500I remember when I was maybe four or five, but I mean, many, many years ago.
00:18:41.920My mother, a couple of times, she sent to me, to one of these old women in my town.
00:18:50.380And they do, for example, something if you had a stomachache, putting a glass with some olive oil inside, a candle, and then massage with some oil.
00:19:34.800my dad somehow came to believe that something had happened to a child in lorenza's care
00:19:41.520and maybe that's why she was killed in revenge i don't remember if he say that probably died
00:19:49.920this baby and and so probably then she had some trouble but really i don't remember more than
00:19:58.720that. So this is Lorenzo. Oh. Yeah. She's severe. I like it. She's severe, right? She, the eyes and the face looks really like a wizard. I think a wizard, right? I mean, I wouldn't mess with her. No. Those cheekbones are to die for. Those cheekbones are to die for. How old do you think she is there, Jo? I mean, let's figure
00:20:28.700out how old she was when she died. 54. So I bet she's in her 40s there, late 40s. Not that much
00:20:36.600older than me. I'm 42. 42? I'm 42. I think people looked a lot older back then. It's hard living.
00:20:47.840Despite spending all that time with my dad, Chiro is not at all bought into this mystery.
00:20:54.520He doesn't seem to think that Lorenzo was murdered at all.
00:20:58.220Part of the story is that she was murdered here
00:21:01.280and that it might have been the mafia.
00:24:44.180The thing about both of these theories is that we've got no proof.
00:24:48.260No proof of the land sale, no proof of the stolen money,
00:24:52.360no proof that Lorenza was a midwife or, God forbid, a Strega.
00:24:58.420We've just got her death certificate, which I found on Ancestry.com,
00:25:03.740and that doesn't list a cause of death.1.00
00:25:06.140It's funny because the Piazzas have made trekking to Caltabalota0.99
00:25:09.500and trying to find family documents a sort of rite of passage,0.99
00:25:14.840But it seems like all of them had a very difficult, or I should probably say weird time, getting any more info about Lorenza, even when they weren't trying to solve her murder.
00:25:30.440When we were there and I was asking somebody about her, and they just looked at me and they kept saying, morte, morte, no.
00:25:53.060My Aunt Gail and Uncle Jimmy, they took a trip a few years ago in which they tried to see the old archives.
00:25:58.420We went right to the business office. It's such a tiny little, you know, village on the top of the mountain.
00:26:04.740And the clerk was there and we asked if we could see the history book.
00:26:10.620It's not a history book, but there are these massive physical books that most small towns in Italy keep, and they list things like births and deaths, and they go back hundreds of years.
00:26:23.360And so the guy, the clerk, brought it out, and we went flipping through this thing. It was huge. And, you know, crinkly paper, so old. And we were going through the book, and then the mayor of the town came in.
00:26:38.980The mayor came in, and he was a son of a bitch.1.00
00:31:38.760Oh, he's bringing the book. He's bringing the book.
00:31:40.900Signor Grado pages through the book. He looks very disinterested. He's got that same look of every bureaucratic official since the beginning of time.
00:31:50.600So this book goes from when to when, what date?
00:31:56.160Most of us in the room do not speak Italian,
00:32:01.060and so we are not sure what's happening at first.
00:32:04.740Grotto's flipping through the beginning of the book,
00:32:06.580going back and forth with our translator.
00:32:09.180Yeah, I asked about the cause of death.
00:32:13.040In the first time he said that he could have died at home,
00:32:16.300but then he realized that he, it's Lorenzo, sorry, she,