Sydney Road
Melbourne's longest shopping strip, a multicultural corridor of bridal boutiques, bakeries and family-run stores.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Sydney Road in Melbourne centers on furniture salesman Franco Cozzo, whose late-night television ads mixing English, Italian and Greek turned this strip into theater for decades. It traces his 1956 arrival in Melbourne from Sicily with no money and little English, and the showrooms he built here and in Footscray. Cozzo slid between languages in the same sentence, deliberately mangling suburb names like Foot-a-scray for Footscray until strangers on the tram repeated them back as jokes.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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