Alfonso Falconeri, Sr.

Alfonso Falconeri, Sr. is the patriarch of the Falconeri family and the father of Al, Serena and Denise. He is a very successful businessman who runs multiple ventures.

Personality
In comparison to most of his family, Alfonso is very kind, adventurous and jovial.

History
Hailing from Italy, Alfonso was born into a poor family, which consisted of him and his younger three siblings: Alessandra, Lilliana and Francesco. His family immigrated to the United States when he was an infant, and the family settled on the East Coast in New York for a time. Their conditions weren't promising, but the family made do with what they money they had. While his mother raised him and his older siblings, his father worked for a year in a clothing store. His grandfather, who had traveled with them from Florence, was a modest merchant with a terrible gambling problem; he lost all of his money to a rival in a betting game, leaving them destitute for a year. When Alfonso was five years old, his father moved the family out west: first in Wyoming, and then later in California when their house was burned down by an Indian tribe.

Although their father worked hard to give them some comfort, the family's condition hardly improved, and for two months they were barely getting by with food. During his childhood, Alfonso would go into town with his father to get supplies, and would encounter people poorer than his family. The town they went to, Sable, was known as a haven for the wealthy, and the distinction between the classes was made clear to Alfonso. When he saw how the poor were getting by, and how the rich would treat them and his father, it angered and saddened him. His father worked hard to bring his family up from a poor standing by running a small clothing store. He did yearn for his family to be well-off, but he instilled in his kids the importance of hard work and never forgetting where they came from, as well as to never look down on the weak. These principles were ones that Alfonso would strive to uphold when he eventually founded his own businesses and started his own family.

When he was twenty, his father died, and as the oldest child brothers, he had to step in and care for his mother and younger siblings, so he took over his father's business. Although he didn't have a lot of work the first year, by the second he had taken his father's small business and made it a town name due to his attention to quality and friendly demeanor with the customers. He also brought his brother Francesco into the business, as his brother was a good advertiser. When demand grew, Alfonso and Francesco decided to expand, but while he was drafting ideas with his brother, he later met Yolanda Jerome, a middle-class woman. He was immediately smitten with her, but his brother Francesco disapproved of the match, believing that she'd distract him from their goal of helping their mother. Alfonso ignored his brother and married her anyway, which brought some disapproval from his family.