User:NickolasMarinelli/Giovanni F. "John" Fugazi

Giovanni F. (John) Fugazi was a businessman, banker, community leader and philanthropist. He was born in Santo Stefano della Badia, province of Milan, Italy, where he spent his childhood before coming to America in 1855. He traveled the south and midwest of the United States, married, and had four children before going west to California. When he arrived in San Francisco, he established two relatively unsuccessful businesses. The first, Tintura di Capelli Orientale, was a line of hair products. The second was a newspaper called La Scintilla Italiana.

Fortunately, for Fugazi, he was more successful in the travel business. He founded "John F. Fugazi and Co.," a travel agency which prospers even today. He also started the Casa Italo-Svizzera-Americana with his partner C. Egisto Palmierei, selling tickets for various steamship lines, such as the White Star Line and Compagnie Général Transatlantique. By 1900, his two sons, James and Samuel, were also working with the family firm.

Fugazi retired from the travel business in 1911, but continued his involvement in other businesses. He had established the Columbus Savings and Loan Society in 1903. His new bank, called Banca Colombo, had twenty subscribers and a capital stock of three hundred thousand dollars. By 1900 its resources exceeded a million dollars. Fugazi relinquished his position as bank president in 1905. Subsequently, in 1923, Banca Colombo merged with Andrea Sbarboro's Italian American Bank. Then in 1927, the combined Banca Colombo-Italian American Bank merged with A.P. Giannini's Bank of Italy, which would later be renamed the Bank of America.

When the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 all but destroyed San Francisco, Fugazi provided capital for rebuilding through a new bank, the Banca Popolare Operaia Italiana, which he incorporated in 1906 with $250,000 in capital. Its board of directors included men and women from the Italian community. The bank did well, and, by the time of Fugazi's death in 1916, the bank had over $7 million in assets. In 1928 Fugazi's second bank merged with the United Bank & Trust Company of San Francisco. This bank was eventually absorbed by A.P. Giannini's Bank of America as well.

Using the profits he earned from his banking and travel businesses, Fugazi became one of the Italian community's most revered philanthropists. He gave his support to a number of Italian community organizations, such the Società Italiana di Mutua Beneficenza, which at the time, owned and operated the Italian Cemetery in Colma, California. His greatest contribution to the Italian community of San Francisco was considered to be the Casa Coloniale Fugazi, a three-story building located at 678 Green Street in the heart of San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. He endowed it with a twenty thousand dollar fund for maintenance. It opened on February 12, 1913, and is said by many to stand as one of his most important contributions to the Italian American community, as well as to the city of San Francisco. The building is still home to the Italian American Community Services Agency, which continues Fugazi's philanthropic work in the Italian-American community and administers the Fugazi trust. A variety of Italian-American organizations regularly use the building, and the main floor is home to Steve Silver's Beach Blanket Babylon, the longest-running musical revue in the history of the American theatre.

In recognition of his philanthropy and community activities, King Victor Emanuel III of Italy conferred upon Fugazi the rank of Cavaliere Ufficiale, a title that Fugazi proudly appended to his name for the rest of his life. The man who was commonly known as Il papà della colonia (the father of the colony) died shortly after he saw the completion of the private mausoleum that he had commissioned to be built at his beloved Italian Cemetery in Colma, California. Although it contains only a single sarcophagus, his mausoleum towers over all the others around it. Nearly a century after his death, Fugazi continues to receive visitors from San Francisco to Italy, and from all around the world.

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