Frank deBellis

Frank V. de Bellis, (born 1898, Francesco Vincenzo de Bellis) in Rutigliana (Bari), Italy. Emigrated to the United States with his family as a child in 1910. Did not complete high school when family sent him to fight in World War I as a teenager; he was captured as a prisoner of war). Returning to the United States he worked in construction, real estate, and insurance. He started collecting recordings of Italian music and culture becoming an expert in music enough to host a radio program called Music of the Italian Masters on San Francisco radio stations airing “good music.” As his collection grew in stature (the best Italian culture collection outside of Italy), he worked with Andreina Becker-Collona in a government educational exchange with the Italian government to obtain Etruscan artifacts for SF State. He donated it to the young California State University system to be housed at San Francisco State in 1963, and the collection opened in February 1964. A few examples of de Bellis’s voice for his radio show Music of the Italian Masters are housed in DIVA: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/debellis/about