Ask the Dust: The Italian Roots of John Fante
Documented family tree & key facts
John Fante — novelist and screenwriter (Ask the Dust, Wait Until Spring, Bandini). b. Denver, Colorado, 8 April 1909; d. Los Angeles, 8 May 1983.
Parents: Nicola ‘Nick’ Fante (b. Torricella Peligna, 29 June 1878) × Mary Capoluongo.
Paternal line — Fante, of Torricella Peligna (Chieti), Abruzzo
Giovanni Fante (b. Torricella Peligna, 26 January 1843), a landowner’s son — furthest documented × Anna Maria Antrilli (b. Torricella Peligna, March 1851; m. 20 June 1871)
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Pietro Nicola ‘Nick’ Fante (b. Villa Piano del Colle, 29 June 1878), bricklayer — emigrated to Colorado
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John Fante (1909–1983)
Maternal line — Capoluongo, of Potenza, Basilicata
Michele Arcangelo Capoluongo, tailor × Caterina Balvano (m. Potenza, 11 June 1836) — furthest documented
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Giovanni Capoluongo (b. Potenza, 11 November 1850), tailor × Luigia Ruoti (b. Potenza, 13 February 1854)
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Mary Capoluongo → John
Worth knowing
Both grandfathers’ worlds — the Abruzzo landowner’s son turned Colorado bricklayer, and the Potenza tailors — became the Bandini family of Fante’s fiction.
Documented by original acts (civil registers of Torricella Peligna in Chieti, and of Potenza in Basilicata). Names earlier than those marked “furthest documented” are not yet proven and are left out.
No American writer put the Italian immigrant experience on the page more fiercely than John Fante. The Colorado boyhood, the bricklayer father, the pride and the poverty of a family caught between two worlds — his Arturo Bandini novels drew their blood from his own. Charles Bukowski called him a god. Yet the family Fante turned into literature had itself been written down, decades before he was born, in the civil registers of two Italian mountain provinces. This is what those registers say.
Denver, 1909
John Fante was born on 8 April 1909 in Denver, Colorado, the eldest of four children of Nick Fante, a bricklayer, and Mary Capolungo. He grew up in Boulder and Denver, left for Los Angeles in 1930, and made his name with Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938) and Ask the Dust (1939). His alter ego, Arturo Bandini, was the son of an Abruzzese mason and a devout Italian mother — which is to say, barely fiction at all. Today Torricella Peligna, the Abruzzo town his father came from, honours him with an annual festival.
Abruzzo: the Fante of Torricella Peligna
On his father’s side, Fante came from Torricella Peligna, a hill town in the province of Chieti. The Fante were not landless labourers but proprietari — small landowners. The registers open with Nicola Fante and his wife Maria Giuseppa Picone, whose son Giovanni Fante was born in the town on 26 January 1843 and baptised two days later in the parish of San Giacomo.
On 20 June 1871, in the town hall of Torricella, Giovanni — a proprietor of twenty-eight — married Anna Maria Antrilli, twenty years old, the daughter of Domenico Antrilli and Maria Vincenza Picone. Their son Pietro Nicola Fante — the future “Nick,” John’s father — was born on 29 June 1878 in the hamlet of Villa Piano del Colle, at house number ten. He would cross the ocean and become a bricklayer.
The family emigrated in the classic pattern of chain migration. The grandfather Giovanni went first, in 1886; Nick followed in 1901; Anna Maria made the crossing in the years around 1900. None of them went home: Giovanni died in Boulder in 1913, Anna Maria in Pueblo in 1940. When John Fante was born in Denver in 1909, his Abruzzese grandparents were living close by.
Basilicata: the tailors of Potenza
While the Fante worked the Abruzzo hills, John’s mother’s people were city artisans in Potenza, the capital of Basilicata — and they were tailors. Michele Arcangelo Capoluongo, born in Potenza on 15 April 1805, son of Bonaventura Capoluongo and Maria Antonia Materazzo, followed the needle. On 11 June 1836, in the parish of San Michele, he married Caterina Balvano. Their son Giovanni Capoluongo, born on 12 November 1850, took up the same trade.
The other maternal line were the Ruoti. Raffaele Ruoti, a farmer, and his wife Antonia Brienza had a daughter, Luigia, born in Potenza on 13 February 1854. On 22 May 1873 Giovanni Capoluongo, the tailor, married Luigia Ruoti. Soon after they emigrated — he in 1874, she in 1877 — and settled first in Chicago and then in Denver, where Giovanni kept a tailor’s shop. Their daughter Mary was born in Chicago on 6 December 1882. Giovanni and Luigia died within a single day of each other in September 1924; a Denver paper noted that the old tailor had followed his wife by less than twenty-four hours.
Colorado: where the two Italys met
The Abruzzo and the Basilicata lines came together on the high plains of Colorado. On 29 June 1908 — his own thirtieth birthday — Nick Fante married Mary Capolungo. Their first child, John, was born in Denver the following spring. The household he would later pour into fiction — the volcanic bricklayer father, the patient and devout mother, the shame and the hunger and the fierce family pride — grew out of exactly this meeting: the landowning mountain family of Chieti and the city tailors of Potenza.
When John Fante wrote Arturo Bandini, he was in a sense only continuing a record his ancestors had already begun — kept not in novels, but in the marriage and birth registers of Torricella Peligna and Potenza. The documents below are those registers.
The documents behind the story
Each act is drawn from the civil registers of Torricella Peligna, in Chieti, and of Potenza, in Basilicata. Click any document to enlarge it.
Abruzzo — Torricella Peligna
Basilicata — Potenza
Documented genealogical research by Clemente Suardi. To trace and document your own Italian family, act by act, request a free preliminary evaluation.