Gloria Asselta’s Legacy of Giving

I had heard about Gloria Asselta long before I ever met her.

During the months I lived in the tiny south Italian village of Pomarico, exploring my paternal ancestry, I would continually encounter evidence of the good work she had accomplished for the community: A new ambulance. Books purchased for the local elementary school. Additions made to the local church.

As it turned out, then in her 90s, Gloria lived in San Francisco and had rarely visited the town where both her parents were born. Yet she was Pomarico’s most significant social philanthropist, donating to causes that made this hillside town a better place.

For me, Gloria’s generosity highlights the selfless altruism of so many players in the Italian diaspora, the heartfelt urge to give back to that place where they trace their ancestral roots.

Why do some people insist on doing more for the “Old Country” rather than merely visit and make personal connections while others choose to go further, to reach deep into their pockets to donate the time and money needed to make a difference?

I wanted to find Gloria and ask her these questions, to plumb the roots of her altruism and unselfishness. But as it turned out, Gloria was not so easy to find.

Just the other day, she died in San Francisco at age 95. 

Her passing was mourned among people she had never met but whose lives she improved. Here’s the story of how I finally met this remarkable woman and how her death leaves a gap that Pomarico may never fill.

*

One day, while wandering the Palazzo Marchesale, the 18th Century palace in the center of town, I entered a second-floor matrimonial chapel and spotted a vintage wedding photo hanging prominently on one wall. 

Taken in 1925, the black-and-white shot depicted a groom wearing a bowler hat and expensive suit, a bride dressed in white, a string of fashionable pearls wrapped around her forehead like a Roaring Twenties flapper.

Posing in the village square, the couple was flocked by scores of smiling villagers. The wedding was no doubt a big deal. But who was this celebrated pair? They looked nothing like any of my Pomarico ancestors. 

As it turned out, the couple, shoemaker Vincenzo Asselta and his bride, Caterina Delorenzo, emigrated to America not long after this photo was taken. I then learned of their only daughter Maria “Gloria” Asselta, an enigmatic figure whose name was on everyone’s lips here.

“Oh, that’s Gloria’s project,” they’d say, or “Gloria paid for that.” 

I wanted to ask Gloria about her lifetime of charity in a town half a world away. She spoke English so I assumed that landing an interview would be easy as finding a good bottle of red wine here.

But reaching Gloria soon became an international version of “Where’s Waldo?”

*

No matter whom I asked, no one seemed to have Gloria’s telephone number. They promised to make some calls and find out, but nobody succeeded. Not even town hall officials could produce a contact for one of Pomarico’s most generous benefactors. She was like some well-guarded state secret.

Eventually, I met Gloria’s cousin, Mario. Alas, Gloria is very private, he said. Some people had taken advantage of her altruism. Instead of giving me her number, he asked for mine. If she has time, he said, she would call me. But no promises.

Then I learned that Mario and his wife, Maria, were major cogs in Gloria’s philanthropic machinery. They knew all the answers. And they had been right under my nose all along. But still no word from Gloria. I left Pomarico with little hope of ever meeting her.

Back in San Francisco, I received a text from Gloria. She was flattered by my interest in her life as a teacher, journalist, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Yet for now, she declined to meet personally. 

She’d gotten old, she said. Most of her life was already behind her.

And what a remarkable life it was. Gloria’s family first settled in New York and then moved west when she was just nine. In high school, she studied Italian, figuring that speaking the language would be the perfect lingua-franca with which to flirt with all the cute Italian boys in San Francisco. 

She soon learned that the language she had long heard at the dinner table wasn’t classical Italian, but the dialect her parents brought from Pomarico. For her parents, speaking the old words of their hometown kept the precious past alive. 

Both so valued their roots in Basilicata that Vincenzo set aside some of his meager shoemaker salary to help Pomarico emerge from the abject poverty he knew as a boy.  He wanted his daughter to share that emotional connection and when she announced plans as a college student to tour Europe — but not Italy — Vincenzo balked.

“My father said ‘If you don’t put a foot in Italy, you’re not going,’ ” Gloria recalled.

She described her first adult visit to Pomarico, back in 1950, during that university excursion. Single women didn’t go out in public alone back then, so an aunt insisted on accompanying her on walks around town.

Gloria then returned to her busy life in San Francisco. She taught elementary school and later married Anthony Joseph Rando, a young man of Sicilian heritage, with a thick head of curly black hair, a career engineer with a lifelong passion for vintage cars. In his eyes, she resembled the actress Gina Lollobrigida. 

His father was overjoyed that he had chosen a girl from the Old Country who spoke Italian. So far, he’d only shown a weakness for bleach-blonde American girls.

The couple both adored Frank Sinatra and played the album “Songs for Swinging Lovers” on an unending loop. Gloria became a journalist, opened an Italian deli and a gift shop that sold T-shirts with quaint Italian sayings like “Sicilians are Sensational,” and even sent one to Old Blue Eyes himself.

“I started making my own money,” she said, “so I didn’t have to worry that my father would cut me off financially if I didn’t go to Italy.”

But she inherited her father’s passion for supporting Italian culture — both in her ancestral hometown and in the Bay Area’s Italian-American community. Back in Pomarico, she provided for a school where the daughter of the aunt who once toured her around town then worked as a teacher. 

“I was really interested in helping kids,” she said. “I liked to see where the money went rather than give it to some organization and it disappears.”

In the early 1970s, she and Tony took their daughter, Angie, back to Pomarico. Recalled Angie, who owns an Italian deli her parents helped her purchase in their San Francisco neighborhood: “I remember hearing donkeys and roosters and how our relatives made a big deal about how they had just installed an indoor bathroom where we stayed.”

Years later, Angie told her mother about a trip to Italy she planned to take with a friend. Like her own father had insisted decades ago, Gloria wanted her daughter to include a visit to Pomarico. And so Angie went. She attended a ceremony to christen the new wedding chapel in the Palazzo Marchesale that her mother had financed. She spotted her family name on plaques around town, thanking them for their generosity for this project and that one.

One day, two priests asked Angie if they could meet with her privately. With stern faces, knowing that she was Gloria's daughter, they presented her with a laundry list of things that needed to be done.

“The sacristy needed a new roof and the daycare center new windows,” Angie recalled. “At first I thought it was strange but then I realized that this is how the old world works.”

Through the philanthropy of Italian-Americans like Maria “Gloria” Asselta.

Still, Gloria’s generosity didn’t always hit its mark. Sometimes the funds she sent to help someone's elderly parent, or to forestall eviction, weren’t always used as intended. The turning point came when she finally reconnected with a loyal cousin, Mario.

He and his wife, Maria, became Gloria’s financial traffic cops, investigating her proposed philanthropic causes and suggesting some of their own.

With Gloria’s consent, Mario and Maria agreed to discuss their relationship with Gloria, which over the years had been conducted solely via handwritten letters. “She enjoys writing and receiving letters,” Maria says, “sending along photos and family stories.”

One day, they finally met. In 2018, the couple attended their son’s graduation from Carnegie Mellon University’s artificial intelligence program. Proud of the achievement of this southern Italian relative, Gloria wrote a column about it for an Italian-American newspaper. Mario and Maria also visited Gloria in San Francisco, cementing a connection that by then spanned an entire ocean. 

“Because of her name, I was expecting to meet someone like (silent film actress) Gloria Swanson,” Maria joked. Instead, they found a woman with a firm resolve and a generous soul. Together, the three became a force of civic improvement in Pomarico.

Eventually, Gloria’s donations launched dozens of projects. Her donations purchased a respirator for the town’s ambulance, a car to transport children to school and numerous books. She later wrote to students: “A good book helps you grow and takes you to distant worlds. I wish you to become great students and always carry the name of Pomarico, a place so dear to me.”

Gloria was made an honorary citizen of this town where she has made a difference from afar. “I keep a picture of my father when he came to America,” she said, “as a reminder of what he became and where he came from.”

From Pomarico.

One Saturday, Gloria changed her mind about meeting me face-to-face: She agreed to get together with me at her daughter Angela’s deli in the city’s Richmond District where the family had lived for decades. 

I found her sitting an outdoor table on a cool, sunny afternoon. In front of her was a handwritten note that read: “Table reserved for Pomarico family.”

A small woman with a white scarf wrapped fashionably around her head, she wore a pair of distinctive glasses, the kind a hip librarian might have donned back in the 1950s. She was adorned by a pearl bracelet and a white fleece pullover with images of red flowers, which reminded me of pajamas — quite stylish for a woman in her 90s.

It dawned on me that Maria’s instincts about Gloria were spot-on: She indeed evoked the image of the film actress Gina Lollobrigida, come back to life, ready to talk about her spirit of generosity for people she had never met. 

Inside, the deli was a shrine to both Tony and Gloria’s southern Italian immigrant heritage. There were pictures showing Vincenzo Asselta singing with a small band of merrymakers on the boat to America in 1921 and many years later, Vincenzo and Caterina toasting at a party, both now gray-haired. She held a bottle of red wine, probably homemade.

There was a shot, taken in 1953, of Gloria as a young woman in her twenties. She was at a party, singing along with a friend who accompanied her on the accordion. She wore a black dress, her hair was black and full. Her one arm was extended theatrically as she sang. She was having fun, as she had all her life.

“I didn’t drink much but I went out to the bars because I loved the social life,” Gloria recalled, her accent harkening back to her early girlhood in New York. Even back then, she hosted singles dances, the proceeds sent to Italy to help disadvantaged children.

I asked why she focused so much energy on people back in Pomarico.

“She’s honoring her father,” Tony said softly.

Gloria nodded. “My mother and father both came from there,” she said. “If I sent money to Pomarico, it honored them both.”

But the town’s largesse was in jeopardy. Gloria was getting older. “This is the first year I’m not feeling so good,” she said. “I’ve already had three friends pass away this year.”

Both her daughters are successful — one as a deli owner, the other as a motivational speaker. Would they continue the philanthropy? “Both would do it if I asked them to,” Gloria said. “But they have to decide for themselves.”

I immediately felt close to this woman whose roots traced back to the same place as mine. So I decided to ask: How much money has she has donated to Pomarico?

“I never added it up,” she said. “It wasn’t important to me.”

And now Gloria is gone. There were words written online about her spirit and generosity.  Said one: “Gloria Asselta has left us to walk through the gates of heaven.”

It is Pomarico’s way of giving back to a woman who gave so much, from so far away.