Italian-Australian icon Franco Cozzo remembered in retail revival

With his animated appearance and distinctive dialect, Franco Cozzo inadvertently became a Melbourne cultural icon while flogging furniture on commercial television.

Best known for his 'Megalo!' catchphrase and pronouncing the inner-west suburb of Footscray as 'Foot-iz-kraay', the ebullient businessman was one of the first emphatically Italian-Australian voices on the small screen at a time when many first-generation European migrants flattened their accents.

Cozzo opened his first furniture showroom in North Melbourne in 1959, after years wearing out his shoe leather as a door-to-door electrical appliance salesman.

Less than a decade later, he expanded his enterprise to establish his best-known outlet — a three-storey edifice in Footscray, which closed in 2018 and is now a craft brewery.

The Franco Cozzo name is also emblazoned on a Sydney Road shopfront in Brunswick, which reopened over the weekend, three years on from the death of its founder, aged 88.

Filmmaker Madeleine Martiniello documented the furniture retailer's career in the 2021 feature Palazzo di Cozzo and said his profile transcended business to become a cultural institution.

The film shows Cozzo's cameo appearances on The Don Lane Show, a Franco parody on 1990s ABC youth program Recovery and even more recent sampling in electronic dance music.

"I think Franco Cozzo presented to Melbourne an example what a migrant can achieve when they come to this country,"Martiniello said.

"I don't just mean that in an entrepreneurial sense, but I mean it in a cultural sense as well.

"I like to think of Franco as someone who built a wonderful life for himself but also managed to become part of the cultural fabric of the city.

"The fact that people are still interested in his shop and the next generation taking over shows that he really meant something on a hyper-local scale to Melburnians."

Several of Cozzo's children have revived his eponymous Brunswick store after a five-year hiatus, with a grand reopening over the weekend.

The Sicilian bonhomie was as conspicuous as the complimentary cannoli and a Italian tricolour archway welcoming customers old and new.

Daughter Alessia Cozzo said the retail revival was inspired by her father's lamentations in his latter years that the next generation would not follow in his footsteps.

"It was at the dinner table, chatting about the shops and … [Dad] said: 'I don't think you guys are going to continue'," she said.

"And we were all said: 'No Papa, we're going to bring back the shop and the sales through generations and generations.' That's how we made the promise to him.

"Papa passing away didn't make it easy but we want to carry on his legacy."

At the weekend reopening, Alessia said her late father's larger-than-life persona was a hard act to follow.

She said despite the showroom hiatus, demand for the distinctive Sicilian baroque-style furniture remained strong in the 2020s.

"He'd be so excited. He'd be so happy and so proud of his four daughters and that he had grown such strong Italian women," she said.

"It's been a long process [to reopen the Brunswick store]. There's a room at the front that's dedicated to Dad. It's got all of his beautiful furniture there and we have a whole wall as a tribute."

Madeleine Martiniello noted that Australian commercial television of the 1980s was highly Anglocentric, with the 1980 debut of SBS TV providing the main multicultural platform on the small screen.

"Franco is a very special character in Melbourne's cultural identity,"the filmmaker said.

"He presented this successful migrant figure but there was also something about his character that was loveable and enticing.

"When I was making the documentary, people would always ask me: 'Is anyone even buying that furniture?' It was something I wanted to answer.

"There's quite an eclectic mix of people that are interested in the Cozzo baroque style: from the classic older Italian migrants to people who have this post-modern appreciation of it.

"I think people may be asking the same question of the reopening of the shop: 'Is anyone going to buying this furniture; is this business going to be viable?'

"I'm really happy to see his daughters do feel there is a future. I'm interested to see how the cultural meaning of the furniture and the store as landmark evolves."