ITALIAN PRESERVES

In Italy, safeguarding the season's harvest is a way of life. For Australia's Italian community, rituals of smoking, salting, drying and bottling are acts of connecting to the motherland.

- LISA MARIE CORSO.

Pietro Demaio is a master preserver of both food and tradition. The retired GP of 40-plus years was born in Melbourne as the youngest of six children, but the story of his family begins in Varapodio, a small village in Calabria in Italy’s south.

It was 1938 and Demaio’s father left Varapodio for Victoria, where he completed his internment period in Warbuton before farming in Swan Hill. The plan was to work in Australia for a few years before returning to his wife and four children, as was customary of many Italian families of the era. However, the war broke out and Demaio’s father became separated from his family for a decade with little communication between them.

In 1948, the family was reunited in Swan Hill. By this time, Demaio’s father had bought a farm and the family quickly got to work. A year later, the sixth family member was born: Pietro.

Demaio fondly describes his father as someone who “always looked beyond the obvious and was always thinking ahead”. This curiosity led his father to take a punt on a business idea. He moved the family to Melbourne, Malvern to be exact, and opened a fruit shop.

“Most Italians stayed in Carlton, Kensington and Moonee Ponds as a community and at that stage we were probably the only Italians in Malvern,” remembers Demaio. Despite this, the family made their mark on Glenferrie Road and ran a successful greengrocer.