About 1,000 people attended Ibleto’s 80th birthday party in 2006, about 600 his 90th in 2016. Both happened at the county fairgrounds, where he opened his Spaghetti Palace, outside the Hall of Flowers, in the early 1970s.
It was there that many local people first tried green spaghetti — the color of pesto. And polenta.
Ibleto notes in his book: “I get a charge out of people liking polenta. Because 75 percent of people they got no idea what polenta is. So many time, people look at dish of my polenta and they say, ’I’d like the lasagna.’ I say, ’It’s not lasagna, it’s polenta.’ They say, ’What’s that?’ I say, ’Cornmeal.’ They say, ’I don’t like.’ I say, ’Try.’ If they do, they usually say, ’More, please.’ ”
The Pasta King’s pesto and other sauces, his minestrone and other foods and the wines that Sebastopol’s Taft Street Winery makes from his grapes and label as Bella Sonoma have won many awards in Harvest Fair judging.
Arturo Louis Ibleto was born Oct. 2, 1926, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His father, Augusto, a former national police officer and World War I veteran in Italy, was working temporarily in South America as foreman of a telephone company crew.
Art Ibleto would say that the mother he adored, Maria, was uneasy living in Argentina because her new son was so beautiful she feared someone would steal him. No one did.
He was a still a toddler when his mother returned to northwestern Italy and to the Ligurian hills village of Sesta Godano, near seaside La Spezia. Augusto Ibleto returned from Argentina for good a few years later.
They would have five children and give them all names starting with ’A’. Along with the others, Arturo learned that to eat, one needed to work. He’d recall lugging large stones from a field that his father was to plow and plant.
As young as about 5, Ibleto was charged with taking the milk cow up into grassland a good climb from his family’s home. He recalled singing for hours for two reasons: It helped to make him less afraid of being up there alone, and it let his mother know he was OK.
He’d often say he lost his entire teens to war. He was 13 when, in June of 1940, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who’d signed a pact with Adolf Hitler, declared war on France and Great Britain.
With both his father and his older brother, Aldo, called to arms, young Arturo Ibleto abruptly became the man of the house. About the time he turned 17, he was drafted into the army of Mussolini’s Hitler-propped Republic of Salò.
All through his life, Ibleto would say he didn’t die soon after he was inducted because he told the truth. He and other newly trained teen recruits stood at attention one day in late 1943 as a general inspected them.
The general would pause before a soldier and ask in Italian, “Where do you want to go, son?” The correct answer was, “Rome, sir.” To go defend the capital.
When the general stopped in front of Ibleto and posed the question, the 17-year-old replied, “Home.” Not long afterward, the insolent private was summoned by a lieutenant and beaten severely.
He was then jailed in preparation for being put on a train presumably bound for a German labor camp. But he escaped to join the Italian resistance movement and to aid the advancing Allies and frustrate the Germans by blowing up bridges and railroad tracks.
He would say he was certain he would have died in dishonor in battle had he not deserted Mussolini’s army, so he figured that answering the inspecting general’s question truthfully saved his life. When recounting his most arduous experiences during the war, he told of lying still in a hole just feet from encamped German soldiers for eight days, and carrying for three days a badly wounded friend.
Ibleto was a 22-year-old war veteran when he bid his parents and siblings goodbye and left Italy for the U.S. on Sept. 14, 1949. At the recommendation of two Italian elders who had worked in Northern California before World War I, he headed for Petaluma.
He found work on the vegetable farm run by the father and uncle of Victoria Ghirardelli. When they married, he left the farm and did all sorts of work before late Petaluma newspaper columnist Bill Soberanes tasted the food he prepared for Sons of Italy functions and declared him the King of Pasta.
Ibleto was just short of 90 when he said for his autobiography, “I hope I leave behind a bit more than I came with. Maybe I help somebody to see that freedom is everything and you can do anything if you work.”
He added, “People they ask me if I do it all over again, what I change? I say nothing. No, nothing.”
He is survived by his son, Mark Ibleto, and daughter, Annetto Ibleto Spohr, both of Cotati; his brother, Angelo Ibleto of Petaluma; his sisters, Amabile Castaletti and Angela Zito, both of Italy, and grandsons Ryan and Ben Ibleto, both of Cotati.
Chris Smith and Art Ibleto were friends for more than 30 years, and Smith co-authored Ibleto’s book. You can contact Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.
The Link LonkNovember 25, 2020 at 11:36AM
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Art Ibleto, Sonoma County's Pasta King, dies at 94 - Santa Rosa Press Democrat
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