Adele Maya DiVita Pross

A funeral Mass will be said March 23 at 11:00 a.m. at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, 2802 Cadiz St., Point Loma, with interment following at Holy Cross Cemetery. Merkley-Mitchell Mortuary is handling arrangements.

Adele was born in Palermo, Sicily, on April 19, 1928, and named Adelaide Rosalia DiVita. As a young bride she sailed to New York on a passenger liner and lived at first with family of her husband Fred Charles Pross, a US Naval officer. She gave birth to their daughter, Linda Susan, on July 9, 1948, in Brooklyn.

Adele pioneered her family’s resettlement from Palermo to San Diego, coming West to establish a home on Point Loma to be followed to the United States by her widowed mother, Maria DiVita, and younger brother, Giralomo. Adele’s sister, Josephine, and Josephine’s husband, Gaetano Tramontana, followed.

Mrs. DiVita, a seamstress, lived at first on India Street. Her husband, Antonino, the siblings’ father, had been conscripted into the Italian army and disappeared during World War II, perhaps in the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943.

“The bombing of Palermo during the invasion was awful,” Adele occasionally related, “so scary and deafening even when we reached a bomb shelter. We’ve never gotten over it.”

The occupying German troops, she said, treated the Italian civilians decently.

Adele enrolled Linda in the St. Charles school and became active in parish activities. She opened the first of her several women’s boutiques of elegant evening and afternoon wear on Rosecrans Street, calling it Poppy. Others followed in Hillcrest, Presidio, and her last on Girard Avenue in La Jolla. She called her La Jolla store Maya. Clients and so many friends addressed her as Maya that she soon used the nickname as well as Adele.

Because her boutique sat adjacent to the La Jolla Art Association gallery, many of its artists befriended her. Adele’s art collection, eclectic and modest in size but always first class, grew exponentially.

Adele’s favorite artists calling San Diego home included watercolorist George Lykos, the Bolivian Jorge Imaná, Everett Gee Jackson, Caroline Schultze, and Jon Helland. She also treasured her friendship with, and collected works from, internationally known Mexico City sculptor Humberto Peraza Ojeda.

Her condo home on Friars Road, with its unique appointments, became almost like an art museum. She could have opened it to the public and charged admission.

Adele felt comfortable in any land. She traveled: Italy, Spain, and, with husband Syd Love, to New Mexico, San Francisco, Monterey, Washington DC, Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, and throughout Mexico, including Monte Albán, Chichicastenango, and Maya ruins. They also visited Palermo and Rome.

A favorite short trip was Adele and her mother taking Linda and Adele’s niece, Gloria, to Palm Springs for the weekend. “My mother and I shopped,” she said. “Linda and Gloria played at the motel pool.”

Her love of good literature helped provide special joy in New Mexico, where --at Taos, the Taos Pueblo, and the D.H. Lawrence Ranch --she followed the steps of one of her favorite authors, just as she had trailed another, John Steinbeck, in Monterey.

Adele loved San Diego, the sun and the Pacific Ocean, babies and children and education. She cherished Palermo, was proud of being an American and an Italian, that her maternal grandfather was impresario of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo and another ancestor had been a cardinal.

She loved spumoni and lasagna and cheeseburgers and chiles rellenos and margaritas. She liked long walks and listening to operas and classical Spanish guitar music and reading --in Italian, in the Sicilian dialect, and in English: fiction, biography, history, Il Carabiniere magazine, which her grandfather started, and Smithsonian and National Geographic.

Adele smiled and laughed easily, frequently, had joy in her heart for everyone, was nonjudgmental and generous, unambiguous and superb company.

Most of all she loved her family. Linda died in 1991.

Adele’s survivors include her sister, Josephine Tramontana; her brother, Giralomo DiVita; granddaughter Maya García (José); great-granddaughter Adrianna Creazzo; and great-grandsons Joshua Mendoza and Raulito García.

Also niece Gloria Vaughn (Rick), niece Juliana Meza (Robert), niece Elizabeth Grima (Davide), niece Francine Serrano (Al), nephew Anthony DiVita (Theresa), grand-niece Danielle Nelson (Brad), grand-niece Scarlett Meza, grand-nephews Christopher and Benjamin Serrano, grand-niece Giovana Serrano, grand-nephews Michael and Blake DiVita, grand-niece Francesca Grima, and grand-grand-nephew Nicholas Nelson.

Also stepdaughters Lisa and Mona Love, step-granddaughter Jaclyn Love, step-grandson Jared Love, step-nephew Mike Morrison, and companion and former husband Syd Love.