Family Stories
This page presents the individual stories of families migrating from Grammichele to Victoria, Australia.
This space is reserved especially for you and allows you to record those memories that are most precious to you, giving life to the unique journey experienced by your family.
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(If you wish to submit your family story - including photos and/or other items - include these in an email to GoV with attached photos)
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Maria Altamore, neè Angelico
1900 - 1993
Nonna Maria, my grandmother
Written March, 1995 by Sarina Greco
I dropped in to see Nonna. It was three o’clock when I arrived and she was just dishing up a bowl of spaghetti for herself. She had made some fresh sauce, just enough for one serve, from the last season’s tomatoes growing in her small back garden.
How times have changed for her. In her younger days. Sundays and holidays always brought a house full of family and friends to her table. From the years before the war, their home on the farm at Werribee was a popular gathering place for many of the paesani. Some were young single men or men who had come to Australia on their own before sending for their fiancés or for their wives and children. They would sit for hours on end after lunch talking with my grandfather, or more often listening to him. They respected him, says nonna, because he was a fine man and a good husband and father. People still recall how my grandfather would sit at the head of the table brushing the crumbs on the tablecloth towards him as he spoke, with deliberate tidy movements of his hand.
I never knew my grandfather, Salvatore Altamore. He died soon after I was born, after being bedridden for months following a stroke. He left behind nine children, the youngest only two years old.
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Thirty years before his death, Nonno Salvatore had left behind his young wife and their first born baby daughter, Anna, when he came to Australia to set up the beginnings of a new life for his young family.
Two years later Nonna and Anna left Sicily to join him. She recalls with much detail the long voyage by ship. Nonna still remembers with pride how she dressed the toddler in an indigo blue velvet dress that she had made by her own hands, the way she combed the child’s hair, the anxious excitement she felt at seeing her husband again and wondering what her new life would bring in this new land.
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My grandfather’s death brought many changes. Times were hard, there were debts and many mouths to feed. They had opened a delicatessen business in Richmond which Nonna then ran with the help of two of the older children.
Copying with the demands of raising younger children on her own and making ends meet financially were not the most difficult changes to adjust to, it seems. What Nonna felt more perhaps was the change in her status and in the respect afforded her family now that her husband was no longer alive. For my grandmother, respect was an important value which she often talked about.
As I sat with her that afternoon while she finished her lunch, I glanced around the room where most of her wake hours are spent nowadays.
The top of her glass cabinet is cluttered with photos, old and new. There are photos of her parents, of herself, and my grandfather in the middle age, of her brother and sister both dead now. In contrast to these old studio photos stand dozens of snap shots of family gatherings, of grandchildren’s weddings, of great-grandchildren.
One is of Sammy, her youngest son, who died many years ago of leukemia just two weeks after he was married. Beside it stands the latest photo from her daughter, Rose, in New York, sent for Easter, which proudly presents her family and her newest grandchild, another great-grandchild for Nonna. On the television stands the large floral bouquet also sent for Easter from Rose in New York.
Nonna caught me looking at a large handwritten note clearly printed and displayed on the top of the television. I would read it from where I was sitting
It said:
MUM,
DR. LIVINGSTONE COMES TUESDAY 11 0’CLOCK. TAKE A BATH IN THE MORNING I’LL COME AT 10 O’CLOCK
CATHY.
Nonna smiled and said – “Cathy thinks I might forget.” I laughed with her.
Sarina Greco
March, 1986
Salvatore & Agrippina Angelico, and Lorenzo Angelico
Recollections of Sam Angelico (grandson and son) published in:
Peter Gerrand, 2025. ‘Growing up in the Italian community on West Melbourne’, Chapter 22, pp.216-221, in West Melbourne. A Sense of place. Editors: Zia Racho-Knight and Felicity Jack. {Hotham History Project, Melbourne, February 2025], ISBN 978-0-9922978-3-1.
Early Recollections​
Salvatore’s (Sam's) mother Eugenia, helped by her daughters, often cooked and arranged two hundred portions of arancini. Other families offered Italian cheeses and sausages, lasagne, lamb cutlets, crumbed chicken drumsticks or salads, and desserts such as Sicilian cannoli, figs and punnets of strawberries. Others provided wine or coffee.
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Later in the day, the back of one of the trucks became a small stage for musicians to perform, stimulating much dancing and gaiety. When Salvatore turned 11 his parents, Lorenzo and Eugenia, encouraged him to change into a blue velvet suit that Eugenia had made for him, with a red bow tie, and perform his magic tricks—such as making multiple billiard balls appear out of thin air—on the small, improvised stage.
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Lorenzo and Eugenia
Sam’s father Lorenzo was, by all accounts, an extraordinary entrepreneur, even among the cohort of innovative Italian immigrants of that era. Together, they changed much of the face of inner Melbourne, opening Italian restaurants and cafes such as Johnny’s Green Room and Brunetti’s in Carlton, and Pellegrini’s in the city. The terrazzo specialists and major building firms, such as the Grollo family, created new Italianate buildings.
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The later wave of Italian migrants from Sicily and southern Italy, such as Sam’s parents (Lorenzo and Eugenia), established their own communities in West Melbourne and in other western and northern suburbs of Melbourne (such as Footscray and Fawkner), or created market farms on the outskirts of the city.
Lorenzo’s father, also named Salvatore Angelico (like Sam), arrived in Melbourne by ship from Sicily in the late 1920s as a potential immigrant, leaving his wife Agrappina and his children (including Lorenzo) in Catania until he had found ongoing work. After finding both paid work and a supportive Italian community in Melbourne, he returned to Sicily three times by boat to persuade Agrappina to join him in Australia. It was only on his third return trip that she agreed. Lorenzo was 14 when he arrived in Melbourne with his mother and two sisters in the late 1940s. One of his sisters died on that passage. They soon moved to 112 Miller Street, West Melbourne. It was a large two storey, 10-roomed brick house on the corner of Miller and Lothian streets, which Salvatore bought. There he established an Italian grocery and general store on the ground floor, run by members of his extended family. On the empty block next to their house, they created a vegetable garden and a large chicken pen.
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The La Scala Cinema
In 1957 Lorenzo became co-founder and part owner of the La Scala Italian cinema in Footscray, which exclusively showed Italian films until it closed in 1972. The first film Sam saw, when he was only five years old, terrified him. It was an Italian version of Ulysses, with the one-eyed giant, Cyclops, emerging dramatically from the sea. The cinema complex, with seating for 800, included a large Italian café that provided valuable cashflow to the cinema. Sam saw some of Fellini’s films there, as well as popular spaghetti westerns and romcoms with the glamorous Sofia Loren and Anna Magnani. Sam remembers rushing from the café, where he had picked up a toffee, to the cinema to see the live fan dancer who regularly performed before the films were projected: ‘very much in the tradition of Italian culture’. La Scala would usually start its sessions with a short comedy by Toto, the immensely popular Italian comedian, before screening classic feature films by directors such as Fellini and Sergio Leone. ‘If you’ve seen Cinema Paradiso, it’s amazing how Dad’s cinema mirrored that,’ recalls Sam. In the mid-1960s, Lorenzo was one of the first people in Melbourne to buy a Super-8 movie projector, and used it to show Charlie Chaplin, Keystone Cops and other black-and-white silent films to family and friends at home. Meanwhile, La Scala became a major hub for the Italian community in the western suburbs of Melbourne.
The Market
Several of the Italian and Chinese families living in West Melbourne ran fruit and vegetable stalls at Queen Victoria Market, with supplies regularly trucked in from the market gardens that their extended families owned on the outskirts of Melbourne. ‘When I went with Dad to the market to get supplies for the shops, he would spend hours there, chatting with my uncles who ran stalls there,’ remembers Sam. ​
