Page 32 - The Hunt - Spring 2021

{A FIRE IN HIS OLD BARN { DIDN’T DOUSE ROSATO’S INTEREST IN CARRIAGES. “I BOUNCED BACK BY GETTING TWO CARRIAGES,” HE SAYS.
Rosato isn't a trained equestrian. “When I was a child, I got so interested in the [fox] hunts that I’d follow them on foot,” he says. “With a horse, you can go faster.”
Rosato got a pony when he was about 10, then graduated to horses. “I never had a formal lesson,” he says. “I learned to ride by the seat of my pants.”
At the time, Rosato’s family lived in Devon, Pa. The “big house” on Conestoga Road had been in Rosato's family for generations. Once a fashionable hotel, the 16-room home had fallen into disrepair and become
a boarding house. Rosato’s father was born there in 1897 and grew up surrounded by boarders, most of them newly immigrated Italian and Irish families. Indeed, Rosato's mother was from a South Philadelphia neighborhood he calls “the Italian ghetto.”
When his parents met, she worked at a bank and he was in medical school. They settled in Devon, where Rosato spent his childhood. “Back then, the area was laced with trails, and we could ride to Valley Forge National Park or Radnor Hunt,” Rosato recalls. “It was all country, all beautiful.”
Judy Rosato didn’t grow up with horses. Born in Kimberton, she spent her childhood in West Chester, then became a first-grade teacher at East Bradford Elementary School. After meeting her husband, she took riding lessons. “I realized that if I was going to have a
life with Don, I'd have to learn,” she says with a laugh. “I enjoy riding, but it's not quite accurate to say that I'm a great rider.”
In fact, Judy has taken some serious spills, breaking a hip and an arm, and fracturing the C2 disc in her neck. “She wore the halo and decorated it with lights,” says her husband. “She’s not that good of a rider, but she looks so good on a horse that it’s amazing. The horses love her, and we both love the carriages.”
30 THE HUNT MAGAZINE
spring 2021