The Pittorino–Mandile Family

No family held 11 Chesley Road longer. From 1945 to 1982 — thirty-seven years — the house belonged to the Pittorinos and their daughter’s family, the Mandiles: an Italian immigrant family whose story runs through the census, the probate courts, and two generations of Newton parish life.

Thomas Pittorino was born in Italy about 1891; his wife Maria (Cappadona) about

1. By 1940 the census finds them around the corner from Chesley Road at 24 Braeland Avenue, sharing the house with their daughter Angelina, her husband Anthony Mandile, and two grandchildren. In 1945 Maria bought 11 Chesley Road from the Merrimac Savings Bank for $4,500 — the bank had held the house since foreclosing on the Fredricksons in 1940 — and the family moved the few hundred feet to the old house on Chesley Road.

Maria died in late 1955. Her probate file is the best mid-century snapshot of the property: the house appraised at $13,750, a small bank mortgage still on it, and almost nothing else — the house was the estate. Thomas stayed on until his own death at home in 1966; his funeral Mass was at Sacred Heart in Newton Centre. His will — drawn in 1947 and not probated until 1969 — contains a telling clause: a specific devise to Angelina of “any and all real estate which is situated in Italy.” The family had kept property in the old country all along.

Angelina M. (Pittorino) Mandile carried the house until 1982, when she sold it for $160,000, closing the era. She outlived nearly all of it: when she died in February 2006, her obituary counted five children, seventeen grandchildren, and twenty-nine great-grandchildren. Her funeral Mass was at Sacred Heart — her father’s church — and she was buried in Newton Cemetery, the same ground as Asa Jewett, who had owned this house before her family was in America.