Santa Rosa restaurateur Tony Prendusi dies at 90

Tony Prendusi ran an Italian restaurant on Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square so long ago that the county courthouse still stood nearby. He had no problem with patrons thinking he was Italian.

But the many who got to know him well and, quite likely, to adore him learned that he was in fact Albanian. And that he’d fled his beleaguered Balkan homeland after a 1939 invasion by fascist Italy was followed by the creation of a Communist, atheist state.

Compact, effusive and faithful, Prendusi would glow as he recounted that Mother Teresa, one of his favorite people, was by blood Albanian. Prendusi befriended the nun and future Nobel Prize winner, and in addition to supporting her Missionaries of Charity starting in 1967, he enlisted influential friends to help him several times fly medical equipment and other supplies to his beloved Albania.

Prendusi was 87 when he flew alone to the Vatican for the canonization of Mother Teresa by Pope Francis in September 2016.

“That was really his lifetime desire, to see Mother Teresa granted sainthood,” said his son, Lenny Prendusi, of Santa Rosa.

Tony Prendusi died March 6 in Santa Rosa from complications of cancer. He was 90.

“Tony was an internationalist,” said longtime friend Jean Schulz, widow of “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz. “He spread love in his restaurant and in his help for people in other countries.”

Prendusi’s longtime friend and doctor, John Reed, said the restaurateur and anti-Communist activist suffered immensely to escape post-World War II Europe. In America, he did well and touched many lives.

“Tony had friends all over,” said Reed, a cardiologist. “I’ve met a lot of people through him.”

Observed another friend for decades, Sal Rosano, the retired Santa Rosa police chief: “Tony was religious, and he lived his religion. He was always grateful, always hopeful, always looks forward to the future.”

Prendusi and his wife, Angelina, who together fled Albania in 1949, operated La Fontana restaurant in the heart of Santa Rosa from 1965 to 1986, and then Mama Angelina’s on Montgomery Drive from 1988 to 1998.

Former Press Democrat restaurant reviewer Jeff Cox wrote in 1995 that he stopped into Mama Angelina’s intending just to grab a pizza, not to review the place. He was surprised to discover, after Tony Prendusi “seated us with friendly, reassuring pats on backs,” that the old school mom-and-pop eatery put out “the best pizza in Sonoma County.”

Prendusi’s given first name upon his birth on May 17, 1929, in the Albanian village of Shkodër was Ndoj (noy). He recalled in a self-published 2014 book, “Peace and Love,” setting out on bicycle with one of his three brothers to capture goldfinches to sell as pets.

“To catch goldfinches,” he wrote, “you had to wake up early, before sunrise; on the way we had to stop to buy buns and rolls.”

The happiness of Prendusi’s childhood dissipated abruptly when, just before his 10th birthday, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded Albania. Bad went to worse after Italy exited the Axis in 1943 and Albania was occupied by Hitler’s Germany.

The end of World War II saw the rise to power in Albania of a Marxist-Leninist government that jailed or executed dissidents, church leaders and intellectuals and in time declared the country the world’s first atheist state.

None of that set well with the deeply religious, freedom-loving Prendusi.

“He was a very young Albanian nationalist,” said physician Reed, a friend of Prendusi for about 50 years. “He was a Catholic, anti-Fascist, anti-Communist. And he was on a list, no question about it. He was lucky to get out of there.”

He’d become a teacher and secretly a member of the resistance to the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha. He was 20 and had fallen in love with Angelina Pjetri when he sensed he was in danger and must leave Albania.

“I had to share the decision with my dear Angelina,” Prendusi wrote in his memoir. “When I told her I must leave, she started crying uncontrollably and said, ‘I would die without you, so I either go with you or I die.’”

They boarded a rowboat on an icy night in 1949 and set out for Yugoslavia. With their escape began a 10-year ordeal that included long, miserable stays in refugee camps, hard labor and, for Tony Prendusi, two years of hospital treatment for tuberculosis.

Both of the Prendusis’ children, Teresa and Lenny, were born during that time without a country. At last, in 1959, friends and relatives in America helped the family win permission to emigrate.

They were then in Italy. When it came time to leave for New York, Angelina was ill with pneumonia. She had to stay back at a refugee camp with the children.

Tony Prendusi arrived in New York City and found work carrying great platters of food up and down stairs at a bustling Italian restaurant, Mama Leone. The work was exhausting, but the food service experience would prove invaluable.

Prendusi’s family joined him in New York in 1960. A few years later, a lifelong friend, Zef Shllaku, invited Prendusi to bring his family to San Francisco.

They went, and Shllaku told them he’d learned that in the center of little Santa Rosa an Italian restaurant called Roma was for sale at a good price. Having saved some money while working in New York, Tony Prendusi bought it. The year was 1965.

Prendusi changed the name to La Fontana. All four Prendusis put in long hours there seven days a week.

The restaurant did so well that in time Prendusi undertook a major expansion. He was proud to get approval from City Hall for the city’s first outdoor dining space.

But the grand restaurant on Courthouse Square didn’t work out as planned. Prendusi said the loss of close-in parking contributed to a decline in business that caused him to sell the building in 1986.

The structure that housed La Fontana is located directly south of the Empire Building, now Hotel E, and is being demolished to make room for the next phase of the hotel.

The Prendusis leased a space in a strip mall on Montgomery Drive and in 1988 opened Mama Angelina’s. They had been retired for a decade when Angelina Prendusi suffered a debilitating stroke in 2008.

Some of her husband’s proudest moments in life involved learning about Mother Teresa, meeting her and making donations to her mission to aid some of the poorest and most desperate people on Earth.

And with the fall of Communism in Albania in the early 1990s, Tony Prendusi enlisted the help of late North Coast Congressman Don Clausen, late Santa Rosa Bishop Mark Hurley, late career Foreign Service officer Robert Frowick, late Santa Rosa physician Bill Sullivan and others to mount humanitarian missions to his deeply suffering homeland, sending medical technology and other materials.

“He did a lot. He always tried to do a lot,” said Susan Martini, a next-door neighbor of Prendusi since 1987. The wife of winemaker and former Santa Rosa mayor Mike Martini, she said Tony and Angelina Prendusi were simply “the kindest, sweetest people we ever met.”

In addition to his wife, his daughter and his son in Santa Rosa, Prendusi is survived by a brother, Peter Prendusi of Shkodër, Albania.

A service at Calvary Catholic Cemetery was private.

You can reach Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.