Find Jesus in the Biscuit Aisle of Melbourne’s Italian Supermarkets

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.

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.

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."

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.