'Ready, pronto, and full of perfume': remembering Franco Cozzo
"No other people are popular like Franco Cozzo in Melbourne" — that's how the iconic Melbourne furniture salesman described himself in a 2022 documentary.
It's unclear whether the statement was meant to be serious or humorous, but Cozzo — who died this week at the age of 88 — was never afraid to laugh at himself.
Cozzo's unique sense of humour is the first thing that his friend Tony Cavallaro remembered about him.
"He loved to joke!" said Cavallaro, who also owns a business in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray, an area that hosted one of Cozzo's furniture showrooms.
"He is going to be missed. He was the largest persona in Footscray. How many people have you heard that don't say Footscray, they say Foot-a-scray? It's sort of stuck in people's minds."
In the 1980s and ’90s, Melburnians were waking up and going to bed with his do-it-yourself television commercials, which featured Cozzo's vibrant, baroque furniture accompanied by his blend of English, Italian, and Greek.
“Grand sale, grand sale, grand sale. Where? In Brun-a-swick and Foot-a-scray,” he would announce with his strong accent.
For many, Cozzo became a symbol of Melbourne's growing multicultural identity in the latter half of the 20th century.
Another small business owner in Footscray, Chris — who was wearing a Franco Cozzo T-shirt — referred to him as his hero.
"He was such a charismatic character," Chris said.
"He came over as a migrant. And being of a European heritage myself, I think it's pretty impressive. He's been a little hero of mine."
Born in Sicily in 1935, Cozzo immigrated to Australia at the age of 21 in the 1950s.
In Palazzo di Cozzo, a documentary about Cozzo released in 2022, he talks about his youth working with his father breaking in horses. He says he never liked that job and wanted a different life.
Like thousands of Italian migrants over those years, he travelled to Australia to follow his dreams, arriving without money and not speaking English.
Before opening his stores in Footscray and Brunswick, he sold electrical appliances from door to door.
The Franco Cozzo showroom on Footscray's Hopkins Street, which Cozzo owned for five decades, was sold for $7 million in 2018, while his longstanding store on Sydney Road in Brunswick has also been closed.
Comments
Post a Comment