Rosemary Petracca Cappello, October 8, 1935-September 13, 2022. Rosemary Petracca Cappello, 86, a longtime resident of Philadelphia—the city she loved—and before that, Darby, PA, where she was known in the 1970s as “The Poet of Darby Creek,” died Tuesday, September 13, 2022, at the Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse after being cared for at home for six months by her beloved family and by an extraordinary Penn Medicine Hospice Team.

Born in Llanerch, PA, on October 8, 1935, she was the youngest of six children to Giovanni (John) Petracca, a shoemaker and musician from Teano (near Naples), Italy, and Rose Arcaro, whose large family of green grocers hailed from Italy’s Campobasso region. An intellectual and deeply learned person dedicated to the life of the mind, Rosemary was also a pianist and watercolorist known for her bold floral designs and abstract energies.