📍Cortland, NY 13045, USA
1945 – 1965“I was born Ronald James Padavona in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in July 1942, while my father was working in the wartime shipyards, and after the war my family moved back to their hometown of Cortland, a small college and factory town in the rolling hills of central New York, south of Syracuse. My parents were Italian-American, and our home was warm and full of music, and Cortland was where I grew up. When I was five, I started on the trumpet, and I took lessons until I was seventeen, practising classical pieces and playing in the high school band and the select dance band. I later said that my voice was a trumpet in my mind: the breathing exercises I learned for the horn gave me the power and control I used as a singer. At fifteen I started playing in a rock and roll cover band, the Vegas Kings, playing bass and then singing, and over the next years we became Ronnie and the Rumblers, Ronnie and the Redcaps and Ronnie Dio and the Prophets, playing all over upstate New York. I took the name Dio from a famous gangster, Johnny Dio, because I liked the sound of it, and because it means God in Italian. I formed Elf, and then joined Ritchie Blackmore in Rainbow, then replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath, singing Heaven and Hell, and then formed my own band, Dio, with Holy Diver and Rainbow in the Dark. I popularised the devil horns hand sign, which my Italian grandmother used to ward off the evil eye. In 1988, Cortland named a street after me, Dio Way, and the town remembers the trumpet player who became one of metal's greatest voices.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today