For his family and friends, Francis Iacono embodied the best of Provincetown: he was an artist, the owner of two much-loved restaurants, and an old-school lobster diver. He was also generous, thoughtful, and kind to a fault — a man who “did not covet,” said his daughter, Nikaline.
Francis died at his home on Commercial Street on the morning of Jan. 12, 2025, leaving a full mug of coffee on the kitchen table. The cause, confirmed by his son Alex, was sudden cardiac arrest. He was 83.
One of three children of the late Frank and Lucy (Mangiarelli) Iacono, Francis was born in Providence, R.I. on Jan. 3, 1942. Even as a child, he always worked hard, said his sister Carol, and he was talented in art, music, and sports.
He played tennis and guitar, and there is a photo of him winning first prize in a banjo contest. “Although I was 11 years younger, he always had time for me,” she said. “He watched cartoons with me on Saturday mornings when he was in high school.”
He graduated from Mount Pleasant High School in Providence in 1960, and at his parents’ urging attended dental technology school to prepare for applying to dental school. While he enjoyed working with dental materials, “his interest was more sculptural than medical,” said his former wife, Muffin Ray. He went on to study liberal arts at Dean Junior College (now Dean College) in Franklin.
In 1965, Francis came to Provincetown to seek guidance from Sal Del Deo, a longtime family friend who had emigrated, just as the Iaconos had, from the island of Ischia off the coast of Naples, Italy. “When I was a boy,” said Sal, who is now 96, “Francis’s grandfather taught me how to skin a rabbit. I always thought of the family as exceptional and Francis as indestructible, so much in control of himself. Extraordinary.”
Francis left Provincetown in 1966 to study art at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, receiving his B.F.A. in 1968. When he returned, he worked on his art and learned the restaurant business from Sal, working mostly at the front of the house at Sal’s Place and Ciro and Sal’s and traveling to Italy to look for wine and other authentic supplies.
In 1972, he opened Rosy, a waterfront restaurant in the East End at 603 Commercial St. After six years of successful operation, the restaurant closed after being flooded in the February 1978 “storm of the century.”
Francis continued to work in restaurants, and soon he had his first solo art show of etchings, pen and ink drawings, prints, and watercolors. Called “Imaginative Fantasy,” the show opened at the Julie Heller Gallery on Sept. 5, 1980.
“Francis was talented in many media,” said Muffin, herself an accomplished artist. “His work was always heartfelt and well done; he knew the rules from art school, and he knew how to break them,” she added. In the Provincetown Advocate’s review of his inaugural show, he pointed to influences from Jean Cocteau to Edvard Munch and Marc Chagall; he also noted that he had converted a press “used to do Chinese hand laundry” to make his prints. That press, Alex said, “weighs about 350 pounds and is made of solid steel.”
In 1982, Francis and Clara Shaw Navarro had a daughter, Nikaline. Soon after her birth, he bought a 25-foot BHM Downeast lobster boat, which he named Nikaline and used to dive for lobsters that he sold from the pier and to the restaurants where he worked. His deepest dive was 90 feet, Alex said. Once, he came to the surface too fast and burst the blood vessels in both eyes; his appearance freaked out his friends over the 18 months it took for his eyes to clear, his son said. Francis later sold the boat.
Toward the end of the 1980s, he met Muffin, a single mother of two children. They married in 1990, settled in Truro, and had a son, Alex. The marriage did not last, but “Francis held the family together,” Muffin said. “He was the head of our tribe, each of us a small piece of Provincetown. He held us together with love.”
In 1994 Francis and family moved to Vermont, where they bought a fixer-upper house in the Northeast Kingdom, Nikaline said. With little work in Vermont, Francis took jobs with telecommunication companies in Rhode Island as a construction supervisor for cell phone towers.
Nikaline recalled that “he would return on the weekends after stopping at the Italian delis of Federal Hill, bringing cold cuts and scungilli on crusty Italian bread and sfogliatella and cannoli for dessert — or breakfast.”
During his years commuting between Vermont and Rhode Island, Francis began to paint again and continued to take photographs, which he had done since he was young. With artist friends in Bristol, R.I., he entered his photographs in group shows, but “he was shy about his talents,” Muffin said. “He didn’t have an ego that needed to be stroked.” He tended to devote his artistic talents to the things in his daily life. “Whatever he touched,” Muffin said, “became artful.”
Returning to Provincetown in 2010, Francis did carpentry work, putting together Shore Galleries with Muffin, who relied on him to stretch her 90-inch canvases and transport her work to shows in New York. In 2012, he opened 9 Ryder Seaside Dining with Fred Hemley at the base of Fisherman’s Wharf. The restaurant was so popular that when Fred died in 2022 a community fundraising effort kept it in business.
During the last five years of his life, “my father found great peace,” Nikaline said. “His children and grandchildren brought him joy.” Francis’s lobster boat came back to the family when Alex bought it and renamed it after his own daughter, Storm Elizabeth. While Alex doesn’t dive for lobsters, he uses the boat to tend his 600 lobster traps.
Nikaline runs her own successful restaurant and wine store, the Vessel and Vine, in Brunswick, Maine. Francis’s son Zach has become a master carpenter, a skill he learned from his father, and his grandchildren, who called him “Pop,” “Popsicle,” or “Poptart,” always made him beam with pleasure.
Francis expressed quiet contentment with his life by feeding a small menagerie of animals at the back of his house. As late as November 2024, he went deer hunting with Alex in Vermont.
“He was active until his last day,” Alex said. He just didn’t have time to finish his coffee.
Francis is survived by his children, Nikaline Francesca Iacono of Durham, Maine, Alex Francis Gano Iacono and partner Florence Mauclere Iacono of Truro, Zachary Bogan of Truro, and Rory Bogan of the Bahamas; his former wife, Muffin Ray of Peacham, Vt.; and his grandchildren, August Leopold Roche, Zola Frances Roche, Storm Elizabeth Mauclere Iacono, and Francis Gano Mauclere Iacono.
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 6 at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown. A private burial at the Provincetown Cemetery will follow.
