There can't be many supermarkets that position shrines to latter-day Catholic saints in the biscuit aisle. Not to mention giant stainless steel tubs of roaring, shark-like dried fish or scrotal chandeliers of hanging cream-white cheeses.But yesterday, just hours after landing on the scorched earth of Australia, I found myself wandering through towers of pennoni lisci and past fridges stiff with arancini balls in Mediterranean Wholesalers on Melbourne's Sydney Road.
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Mediterranean Wholesalers is quite possibly the most beautiful supermarket in the Western world. Diminutive Italian men in box-fresh white singlets and starched shirts embrace in the aisles, as their coiffured wives in floral blouses, slingbacks, and giant hedge-like fleeces load their shopping baskets with tomatoes, artichokes, and beans from the old country.Statuesque Greek teenagers with eyebrows like slicks of tar stand behind knee-height cash registers, staring past the tins of chickpeas and packets of pasta into the middle distance. A long trestle table covered in freshly-baked bread lines the front window, below huge sun-faded adverts for fresh ingredients and a taste of home.
In the post-World War II era of "populate or perish," immigrants from Europe—particularly Italy and Greece—flooded to Australia; Melbourne in particular. Between July 1949 and June 1959, 201,428 Italians settled in Australia and Melbourne still boasts the country's largest Italian Australian population. No wonder this huge, marble-topped cathedral to home cooking became such an institution. For nothing settles the pangs of homesickness like a familiar label, the picture on a packet of butter, or the taste of a childhood treat.
As I walked into the shop, Tetris-like stacks of olive oil rose up around me like a Manhattan of zinc and tin. Looking along the row, I realised that each brand came replete with a different raven-haired pin up on the label.
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The Spanish Cabonell woman sits on a wall; her arms raised, her waist tiny, smiling provocatively at some olive farmer just out of shot. The Basso figure is dressed like a well-meaning 18th century magician, smiling maniacally as she rips down branches of olives to place in her wheel-like basket. The Annalisa tinned tomato gal holds a plum-like specimen up to her neck, dressed like an IKEA-themed peasant in blue and yellow, while Carmelina tuna lady rests her substantial cleavage on two dead, wet fish.
At the end of the row, I came upon a giant cheese and meat counter—as bright as the midday sun. Leg-like slabs of ham, an Ayers Rock of gouda and tearable balls of mozzarella shone out from on top of a stainless steel counter. But the smell was altogether more aquatic, more salty; like a pair of post-cycling knickers. The scent of dried fish floated over from the display of twisted grey creatures, delivered once a week to be boiled down for stock.
Not only does Mediterranean Wholesalers sell more types of polenta than I've had sexual partners, they also have a dazzling display of products I'd never even heard of before. Like the "effervescente, al limone flavour," which was, as far as I could tell, a small lemon-scented jar of polystyrene packing foam. Although the sexy woman on the label seems to be holding up a fizzing glass of piss, so who knows.
Hidden among the stock cubes and tinned anchovies, Mediterranean Wholesalers also stocks products probably best described as "novelty." Like the ceramic figurine of a Calabrian man giving the universal "fuck off" gesture with his small, varnished arms; his face a perfect blow job of Italian defiance below a little hand-painted bowler hat. Or the array of biscuit tins, each decorated with a different simpering, chubby-thighed child, stacked up on the supermarket's marble shelves in a display aimed—I can only imagine—at questionable "uncles."
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I spent a few happy, mindless seconds staring blankly into the fridges full of real Parmesan, before a man in loafers and a hairnet gently pushed past me with a trolley covered in gnocchi.Slowly gliding past regimented lines of multi-coloured pasta and bathtub-sized jars of Nutella I didn't quite get the feeling that I had slipped back to Europe. This was a Mediterranean as imagined by Bryan Forbes or even David Lynch: silent, pale, timeless. Populated by pint-sized men in smart polyester slacks and woven-shoed woman in peach-scented face powder. The aisles wide and highly-polished, the displays almost ceremonial in their exactness. The tables a continental confusion of mainland oils, starch, and salt.
But it did give me one of the happiest half hours I've had since touching down in this nasal-voiced, sun-baked continent. And for that I give thanks. Right next to the biscuit aisle.