Tony Prendusi ran an Italian restaurant on Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square so long ago that the county courthouse still stood nearby. He had no problem with patrons thinking he was Italian.

But the many who got to know him well and, quite likely, to adore him learned that he was in fact Albanian. And that he’d fled his beleaguered Balkan homeland after a 1939 invasion by fascist Italy was followed by the creation of a Communist, atheist state.